Renee Descartes, 1596-1650

The Ghost in the MachineCogito ergo sum

How else do we explain the mystery of consciousness?

If I have a thought about a dog, I can’t pull that thought out of my head and measure it.

20th Century Materialism and Philosophy of Mind

• In 1925, C.D. Broad published “The Mind and Its Place in Nature.”

• This is ‘emergent materialism’ based on C. Lloyd Morgan’s idea that the mind is a ‘qualitative novelty.’ It is a sum different from the parts that constitute it.

• The mind produces something more than an organ produces, more than is found in nature.

D.C. Broad believed in the paranormal and psychical research as part of

emergent phenomena

Philosophical Questions Broad Said Were Posed by Psychical Research:

• Backward causation – from the past you can predict the future. What if you’re psychic?

• Telekinesis – If the mind can move objects this refutes dualism. The mind and physical things can interact.

• If minds can communicate with each other – literal mindreading – this indicates something else about the nature of mind.

More Philosophical Questions

• We use reason and empirical evidence to establish knowledge, but there is a question of a different way of knowing through psychic insight.

• If ghosts exist, then there can be persons without physical existence. This opens another set of questions.

What is belief in ghosts?

Ghosts as a metaphor in emergentism• The idea of ghosts can help provide us with an

image of what is being proposed in emergentism. Since emergentism does not believe in mere ghosts, they say spirits don’t exist, but ‘emergent’ properties do.

• As J. Kim explains it, “Property emergence is when aggregates of material particles attain an appropriate level of structural complexity (“relatedness”) genuinely novel properties emerge to characterize the structured systems.”

Emergentism as Non-Reductive Physicalism

• So, emergentism stays within materialistic conceptions of mind but is non-reductive.

• What does non-reductive mean? It means that everything we know as symbolized by X is not enough to explain (Y,Z, T).

• There are 2 types of emergence in this kind of non-reductive physicalism

Resultant and Irreducible Emergence

• Resultant emergence would be something like if you say X is not equal to (Y,Z,U) but if you add Y and Z and U, it does result in let’s say 2X. It is additive or subtractive, and can result in something we haven’t seen before, but it isn’t novel.

• Irreducible emergence, on the other hand, is something entirely new. “Emergent properties are irreducible to, and unpredictable from, the lower-level phenomena from which they emerge.”(Kim, 228)

Irreducible Yet Emergent: The Transparency of Water and H2O

From the 1920’s to the 1960’s: Identity Theory

• In 1949 the publication of Gilbert Ryles’ The Concept of the Mind arrived, which attacked any idea of mind-body Cartesian dualism.

• Ryles claimed that the dualism was false – either there are minds or bodies, but not both. This is a move towards mind-brain reductionism.

• Incidentally, 1949 was also the year that Antonio Moniz won the Nobel for prefrontal lobotomy.

What are the consequences of a theory of mind-brain reductionism?

Identity Theorists from Down Under

• The United Australian Front for Sophisticated Materialism (as they called themselves in jest) included JJ Smart and David Armstrong – identity theorists who asserted a reductive physicalism in the 1960’s.

David Armstrong and JJ Smart: Identity Theorists

Identity: Identification of 1 Phenomenon

• To identify an event in the brain with an event in mental phenomena, identity theorists made the claim that the two are identical (have the same identity), but we know them differently.

C-Fiber Activation and Pain

• C-Fiber

Armstrong’s Argument – whoops wrong Armstrong! That’s not the right

identity.

Armstrong’s Argument

• Armstrong offers that psychoneural identity is like the identification of DNA. Scientists were looking for the “causal agent in the transmission of inherited characteristics in organisms.” (Kim) The DNA molecule fit this role.

• Armstrong says it is the same with c-fibers and pain. The activation of C-fibers is the causative agent in pain.

Theoretical Identities in Science

• Morning Star is the Evening Star. They are identical, but we learn this through observation.

• H2O is water.• Heat is molecular motion.• The HIV virus causes AIDS.• Creating an identity-knowledge – and being

able to establish identity – is critical in science.

Different Meanings of Identity

• Predication: Helen is 12 years old.

• Definition: Larry is a bachelor.

• Composition: This table is an old packing case.

Why is Identity Important?

• Even though these identities are not sufficient to tell us everything about Helen, Larry, the table or the packing case, identification is useful.

• The fact that Helen is 12 might be important information in deciding whether Helen should get a flu shot or go walk by herself to the mall, for example.

Arguments for the Advantage of Psycho-neural Identification

• Everywhere in nature we see increasing complexity, but in the brain, we can simplify if we can say X is the SAME as Y and reduce the number of phenomena from 2 to 1.

• Linguistic simplicity: Mentalistic language of aches and pain could be replaced with their neural correlates.

Psychoneural Identity Sleight of Hand

• If I identify c-fibers with pain, I get rid of a causal law and replace it with identity.

• This means I am not saying c-fiber activation causes pain, I am saying c-fiber activation is pain.

• As Kim explains it, “By interpreting psychoneural correlations as identities, the identity theory gets rid of them as laws…”(54)

Physicalism

• In order to make it clear how these neural events are correlated with their expressions in physical attributes, it is important to break the concept down even further.

• To say all mental events have a physical correlate, is also called physicalism. Within physicalism there are two ways of looking at identity theory – type and token physicalism.

Token Physicalism

• This is non-reductive physicalism, also called minimal physicalism.

• “Every event that falls under a mental-event kind also falls under a physical event kind.” (Kim, 59)

• Token physicalism does not require a strict correlation between mental and physical, however. (61)

Token Physicalism

• For token physicalism,the specific example but not the type might exist. If see a car but have no conceptual category for it, it still exists as a token but not a token of a type.

• The token is the particular example of the type. So, the type is the general category and the token is the specific example. So of course the token might not have a type.

Some theorists accuse token identity of being a kind of property dualism.

Token Identity Theory• Donald Davidson: So, the mental event just is

the corresponding physical event. It really is the supervenience of the mental over the physical.

Type physicalism: All Rings

We have rings.

• Rings are of a type. Type in other words means the concept or category of the thing.

Type-Type Identity Theory

• All mental event types are physical event types. There are no mental events without a physical correlate.

• So, the example of pain being C-fiber activation is a type-type identity theory (Kim p. 60).

• The term type-type means mental and physical are both physicalist types.

Type-Type Taxonomy

• If you are going to argue that everything has a physicalist basis, Cynthia MacDonald asks, “How are events or properties to be taxonomized as mental or physical?”

• You still have to establish one taxonomy for mental and one for physical, and then look at correlations.

What is Taxonomy?

Mental Taxonomy• What do we consider mental events?• Infallibly knowable and lacking spatial

dimension?• Does that mean that any physical event

cannot be infallibly knowable and lack spatial dimension?

• Can we say that any mental phenomenon is one that contains the words ‘believes’ and ‘desires’? Then is it true any event could be a mental event?

Physical Taxonomy

• What are physical events? Do they need to be events without any mental phenomenon associated with them?

• Are they made out of ‘material’ and have a spatiotemporal dimension?

• How do they exist without having been the product, observation, by a mental event?

Kinds of Mental Events?

• Mental events are also not all of the same kind.

• There are sensations – feeling events like pains, tingles, itches, auditory, tactile feelings, and color perceptions.

• There are propositions: I know that the earth is round. The ‘that’ clause – that the earth is round – implies knowledge of something other than the knower.

Type-Type Identity: JJ Smart

• Strict identity thesis, which is Leibnitz’s “Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals.”

• This means x = y in all discernible ways.• Since Smart knew the problem of making any

two things one identical phenomenon, he moved to ‘identical events’ shaving off part of the problem with 2 phenomenologically different things.

Multiple Realizability Objection

• If C-fiber activation and pain are identical, what about pain in animals that experience pain but not through C-fiber activation?

• Are there other ways of experiencing pain, and is pain generalizable enough to be manifested differently and to expand past this x = y container around the ‘event’?

Ullin Place

• Brain states and sensations are identical.• Propositional attitudes (Is it going to rain

tomorrow?) cannot be theorized into a brain state.

• Two-factor theory – there is a phenomenological difference – episodes of consciousness occur inside a sensory apparatus but are not known as the senses are known.