PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
Introduction
Human person
is comprised of both physical and mental properties. The physical properties
being something accessible to everybody, that is, something anybody can see and
observe, which includes size, weight, shape, colour, etc. unlike the physical
properties, the mental properties can only be directly observed by the
individual, the subject, the self. It include consciousness,(perceptual
experience, emotional experiences), intentionality ( including beliefs,
desires, etc) and they are possessed by subject of self.[1]
Philosophy of mind encompasses all of the above mentioned, but why philosophy
of mind, why do we have to study it. This paper is geared towards the reason
why we have to study the philosophy of mind. To achieve the aim of this paper,
we shall first of all have a good knowledge of what philosophy of mind is all
about, that will help us to know it’s relevant and why we have to study it.
This will lead us into the following;
·
Definition of philosophy of mind
·
Mind body problem
·
Dualism school of thought
·
Monism
·
Neurophilosophy
·
Conclusion
Definition
Of Philosophy Of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the
physical body, particularly the brain.[2]
Its central issue is the mind-body
problem (the relationship of the mind to the body), and the challenge is
to explain how a non-material mind
can influence a material body
and vice-versa.[3]
Mind–Body Problem
The
mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists
between the mental processes, and bodily states or processes. Philosophers
here aims at achieving the knowledge of the nature of mental states and how
they affect the body, (that is if they affect the body)[4]
They
asked the following questions [5]
- What are mental states and what
are physical states?
- Is one class a subclass of the other, so
that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states
and physical states entirely distinct?
- Do physical states influence
mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?
The
quest to provide answers to the above questions brought about the different
philosophical views otherwise known as schools of thought.
In
philosophy of mind there are two major schools of thought; Dualism and monism. these schools of thought tends to give
answer to the mind body problem.
DUALISM
Dualism is a theory in philosophy of mind
that states that the mental and physical, mind and body, mind and brain are in
a way different from each other.[6] It is the position that mind and
body are in some categorical way separate
from each other, and that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical in nature.
This
school of thought was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. He
began by contending that it is conceivable that the mind exist without body,
and then he argues for dualism by deriving that it is possible for the mind to
exist without the body.[7]
Descartes’ point of view was that mind and body are distinct and separate entities.[8]
Dualist schools of thought
There
are three main schools of thought under dualism, they include the substance
dualism, property dualism and predicate dualism.
Substance Dualism
substance
dualism can be expanded to four thesis.
1. There
are two worlds, the one populated by physical objects, the other by mental
objects
2. Physical
objects are essentially (bits of ) clockwork; mental objects are eddentialy
(states of) consciousness
3. Physical
objects are public and observable, though fallible, via the senses; mental
objects are private and (quasi) observable via the infallible faculty of
introspection
4. Physical
objects and mental objects interact causally within a human being; hence mind
and body are externally or contingently related.[9]
Substance Dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian
dualism’. Substance dualists argue that the mental and the physical are
independently existing substance.[10]
It states that the immaterial mind and the material body, though ontologically
distinct in respect to substance causally interact. Meaning that mental causes
physical effect and physical or material body causes mental effect. This view
raised a problem of the point of interaction between mind and matter. Descartes
in an attempt to resolve this issue or problem, stated that the point of
interaction takes place in the pineal gland.[11]
Property Dualism
Property dualism is the view that the world is
constituted of just one kind of substance – the physical kind – and there
exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view
that non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions)
inhere in some physical bodies (at least, brains). How mental and physical
properties relate causally depends on the variety of property dualism in
question, and is not always a clear issue. Sub-varieties of property dualism
include:[12]
There are various types of property
dualism
Interactionism, it states that mental causes (such
as beliefs and desires) can
produce material effects, and vice-versa. Descartes believed that this interaction
physically occurred in the pineal gland.[13]
In other word, it is the view that mind and body—or mental events and physical
events—causally influence each other. The physical world influences my
experience through my senses, and I often react behaviourally to those
experiences. My thinking, too, influences my speech and my actions. [14]
Occasionalism, asserts that a material basis of
interaction between the material and immaterial (mental and physical) is impossible, and that the interactions
were really caused by the intervention
of God on each individual occasion. Nicholas Malebranche was the major proponent of this view.[15]
Parallelism (or Psychophysical Parallelism), holds that mental causes only have
mental effects, and physical causes only have physical effects, but that God
has created a pre-established harmony
so that it seems as if physical
and mental events (which are really monads,
completely independent of each other) are caused by, one another. This view was
most prominently advocated by Gottfried Leibniz[16]
In other words, parallelism is the view that mind and body, while having distinct
ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run
along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain
events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each
other. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies
would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established
harmony.
[17]
Epiphenomenalism, which asserts that mental events
are causally inert (i.e. have no physical consequences). Physical
events can cause other physical events, and physical events can cause mental
events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products of physical
events which occur in the brain of the physical world. This doctrine was first
formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley
in the 19th Century, although based on Thomas Hobbes' much earlier Materialism theories.[18]
Dual aspect theory or dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives
on, the same substance.[19]
dual-aspect theory suggests that the mental and the
physical are manifestations (or aspects) of some underlying substance, entity
or process that is itself neither mental nor physical as normally understood.
Various formulations of dual-aspect monism also require the mental and the
physical to be complementary, mutually irreducible and perhaps inseparable
(though distinct)[20]
Predicate Dualism
Predicate dualism states that mental
predicates cannot be reduced to material predicates, although supervenience
holds.[21]
it argues that
more than one predicate (how we
describe the subject of a proposition) is required to make sense of the world,
and that the psychological
experiences we go through cannot be redescribed in terms of (or reduced to) physical predicates of natural
languages.[22]
Predicate dualism according to the
standford encyclopedia;
Predicate dualism is the theory that
psychological or mentalistic predicates are essential for a full description of
the world and are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental
predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of
psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of
the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without
it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside
psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O:
something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace
the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could
convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences
(that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not
every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation
of the currency or every coup d'etat has the same constitutive
structure.. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are
similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to
physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism.[23]
MONISM
Monism
is the position that mind and body are not independent substance, that is, they
are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated
by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later
espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[24]
Monist philosophers adopt either a reductive position or non reductive
position, each maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not
something separate from the body. Other philosophers, however, adopt a
non-physicalist position that challenges the notion that the mind is a purely
physical construct.
There are three main Monist schools of thought
MATERIALISM
Materialist
views states that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just
physical states.[25] It
is the position that everything that exist is matter or physical. They have the
view of wheather the mind exist or not and because of this differing view
materialism can be divided into two groups.
There are two main types of materialism, the reductive and
non-reductive materialism.
Reductive materialism asserts that all mental states and
properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological
processes and states.[26]
there
are three main types:
Behaviourism, which holds that mental states are
just descriptions of observable
behaviour[27].
Type
physicalism or Type Identity Theory, The notion ‘type’ and ‘token’ here
comes by analogy from ‘type’ and ‘token’ as applied to words. A telegram ‘love
and love and love’ contains only two type words but in another sense, as the
telegraph clerk would insist, it contains five words (‘token words’). Similarly
a particular pain (more exactly a having a pain) according to the token
identity theory is identical to a particular brain process.[28]
Type identity theory holds that specific
mental states are identical to specific physical internal states of the brain[29].
This theory was developed by John Smart and Ullin Place. They reasoned that, if mental
states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are
probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a
mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental
state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than
the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions"[30].
The identity theorist believes that the same way he feels a particular pain
today, that he will still feel the pain tomorrow. He equally expects his eye
pain to be similar to his wife eye pain. And he would expect his pet, dog to
have similar eye pain and any other being that can have eye pain. Even here,
however, he might expect some similarities of wave form or the like.[31]
Functionalism: it holds that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in
pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role and can be characterized in terms of non-mental functional properties[32].
(like Lewis and Armstrong). A typical example is seen in biology where one can
define a part of the body by it’s function. The heart, be it for man, or monkey
or chicken can be defined by it’s function which is pumping blood to different
parts of the body. Functionalism identifies mental states and processes by
means of their causal roles. [33]
Non-Reductive
Physicalism:
it argues that, although the brain
is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental
descriptions and explanations cannot be
reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science. Thus, mental states supervene (depend) on physical states,
and there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical,
but they are not reducible to them[34].
mental states (such as qualia) are not reducible to physical states.
There are three main types:
- Anomalous Monism, states that mental events
are identical with physical events, but that the mental events are not regulated by strict physical laws[35].
- Emergentism, involves a layered view of
nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity, each corresponding to its own special science[36].
- Eliminativism (or Eliminative Materialism), which holds that people's
common-sense understanding of the mind ("folk psychology") is hopelessly flawed, and will eventually be
replaced (eliminated) by
an alternative, usually taken to be neuroscience[37].
The
idealist school of thought held that the mind is all that exists and that the
external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind.[38]
In other words the only existing substance is mental.
Different
varieties of idealism may hold that there are[39]
NEUTRAL MONISM
Neutral monism, in philosophy, is the metaphysical view that the mental and the
physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are
themselves "neutral", that is, neither physical nor mental. This view
denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things.
Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff,
in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor
physical. These neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just
as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not
exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or
physicalistically); they exist on their own.[40]
Neutral monists such as Ernst Mach and William James argue that events in the world can
be thought of as either mental (psychological) or physical depending on the
network of relationships into which they enter,[41]
NEUROPHILOSOPHY
According
to Patricia Churchland, a major proponent of neurophilosophy. She posited that
the mind is nothing but the brain states. That we make think, and feel, and
make decisions, and plan is just an activity and the processes of the brain.
Even the will has something in the brain that is in charge of it’s operation.
She posited that mind body problem cannot be resolved by deep thought of
philosophers, rather it needs facts not
just mere reasoning,
WHY PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
With the above knowledge of what philosophy of mind is all about,
with that in mind, we can now answer the question, “why philosophy of mind”.
Philosophy of mind is relevant for the following reasons;
1. To get a good knowledge of what
mental states, mental events, mental processes, mental function is all about
and in general the nature of the mind.
2. To get a good knowledge of the
physical realities.
3. It also help to know if the mind is
really in existence and if the body is really in existence
4. As the philosopher will say, “man
know thyself”. Philosophy of mind is relevant in terms of knowing the reality
or composition of a human person, if the
human person is composed of just mind, or just physical realities or the both.
5. To get a good knowledge of the
interaction between the mind and the body(that is, in the cases where both are
accepted to be in existence).
6. Finally and most importantly,
philosophy of mind is relevant as it tries to solve the mind body problem.
Conclusion
Philosophy
of mind is geared towards solving the
body and mind problem
REFERENCES
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Gershenson, Diederik Aerts, Bruce Edmonds, Worldviews,
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Gordon
Baker and Katheringe J. Morris, Descartes’
Dualism, Cartesian dualism. Routledge, Taylor and Francis group. London and
new York. Page 11
Isaac Ikperua class note.philosophy of mind. 2016
Luke Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html.
2008.
Marleen
Rozemond, Descartes’ dualism, the real
distinction argument. Harvard University press, Cambridge, Massachusetts ,
and London, England. Page 1
Standford
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William
R. Uttal, Dualism the original sin of
cognitivism. Arizona state university. Psychology press, Taylor &
Francis group. New York London.
[2]Luke
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2008.
[4] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. philosophy of mind, last modified on 24 November 2015.
[5]Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, dualism . last edited Thu November 3, 2011
[6] ibid
[7]Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’
dualism, the real distinction argument. Harvard University press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts , and London, England. Page 1
[8] William R. Uttal, Dualism the
original sin of cognitivism. Arizona state university. Psychology press,
Taylor & Francis group. New York london
[9] Gordon Baker and Katheringe J. Morris, Descartes’ Dualism, Cartesian dualism. Routledge, Taylor and
Francis group. London and new York. Page 11
[10] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[11] Isaac ikperua class note.
[12]Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. philosophy of mind, last modified on 24 November 2015.
[13]Luke Mastin,
The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[14]Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, dualism . last edited Thu November 3, 2011
[15] Luke Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[16] ibid
[17] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. philosophy of mind, last modified on 24 November 2015.
[18] Luke Mastin,
The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[19]ibid
[21] Eds. Carles Gershenson, Diederik Aerts, Bruce Edmonds, Worldviews, science and us, philosophy and
complexity. University of Liverpool, uk. 11-14 september 2005. World
scientific publishing co. pte. Ltd. Page 291
[22] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[23] Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, dualism . last edited Thu November 3, 2011
[24]Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. philosophy of mind, last modified on 24 November 2015.
[25]Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, dualism . last edited Thu November 3, 2011
[26]Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. philosophy of mind, last modified on 24 November 2015.
[27] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[29] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[30] Wiki philosophy of mind
[32] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[34] Luke
Mastin, The Basics of Philosophy. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_epistemology.html. 2008.
[38]Wiki philosophy of mind
[39] ibid
[40] wiki
[41]ibid
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