Lecture 7&8, Chapter 7 Flashcards
Mind-brain problem
Issue of how the mind is related to the brain; three main views are dualism, materialism and functionalism
Dualism
View of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions
Consciousness
Private, first-person experiences an individual lives through; contains all the mental states a person is aware of; part of the mind that can be examined through introspection
Materialism
View about the relationship between the mind and brain that considers the mind as the brain in operation
Folk psychology
Collection of beliefs lay people have about psychological functioning; no efforts made to verify empirically or to check them for their internal coherence
Identity problem
The difficulty the materialistic theory of the mind-brain relationship has to explain how two events can be experienced as the same despite the fact that their realization in the brain differs
Functionalism
In the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal consistency, but rather on the way it functions; predicts that the mind can be copied onto another Turing machine
Meme
Information unit proposed by Dawkins that reproduces itself according to the principles of the evolutionary theory
Symbol grounding problem
The finding that representations (symbols) used in computations require a reference to some external reality in order to get meaning
Embodied cognition
The conviction that the interactions between the human body and the environment form the grounding (meaning) of human cognition
Access consciousness
Access conscious information can be reported by the patient, used for reasoning and acted upon intentionally
Phenomenological consciousness
Refers to the fact that human experiences possess subjective qualities that seem to defy description; experiences have a meaning that goes beyond formal report
Masked priming
Experimental technique to investigate unconscious information processing, consisting of briefly presenting a prime between a forward meaningless mask and a subsequent target, and examining the effect of the prime on the processing of the target
Global workspace model
Model that explains the role of consciousness by analogy of the theatre; consciousness is meant to make some info available to the whole brain (the play), so that background processes can align their functioning to what is going on
Chinese room
Thought experiment by Searle to illustrate the difference between information processing in humans and computers
Qualia
Qualities of conscious thoughts that give the thoughts a rich and vivid meaning, grounded in interactions with the world
Zombie thought experiment
Chalmers; illustrates that consciousness is more than the working of the brain or the implementation of information on a Turing machine because it involves a subjective component with qualia
Hard problem
Chalmers; difficulty of explaining in what respects consciousness is more than accounted for on the basis of functionalism
What is monism
The idea that there is only one kind of substance, opposite of dualism
What are the 3 versions of materialism and what do they mean
Eliminative materialism = mental states can be reduced to brain states; denies the existence of mental states —> they are just illusions
Reductive materialism = types of mental states can be reduced to types of brain states
Nonreductive materialism = mental states are still brain states but the brain states can differ per person/time/situation/etc.
What is type-type identity and token-token identity
Type-type: types of mental states are identical to types of brain states (reductive materialism) —> eg. Everyone who thinks ‘I like ice cream’ has the same brain state but it’s different from everyone who thinks ‘I want to buy ice cream’
Token-token: the same mental state can refer to different brain states depending on the person/time/situation
What is multiple realizability
This means that the same mental state can be realized in different ways (different brain states)
What are the 5 problems of substance dualism and explain them
- The interaction problem; how can a no material entity cause physical events
- Causal closure problem; if every physical event has a physical cause, where does the mind enter? How about the law of conservation of energy?
- Brain damage problem; why would a no material entity react to brain damage
- Existence of unconscious processes
- Disappearance of mystery forces in the scientific world —> it’s not a scientific position
What are bridge laws
They map the higher level concepts onto the lower level concepts/laws; they explain the relationship between them
What was most important in functionalism
The role of mental states
What materialism is functionalism similar to
Nonreductive materialism
What is idealism
Ultimately everything is mental; reality is in essence a creation of the mind
What are 4 problems with functionalism
- Cognitive neuroscience postulates a closer link between the brain and information processing.
- The symbol grounding problem:
an external source of information is necessary to gain meaning, computers cannot function without human input in changing environments–> Chinese Room thought experiment. - Explanatory power is low: everything can be described functionally, but what can it explain/ add to our understanding?
- embodied cognition: the interaction between body and environment could provide this needed grounding for cognition
What is the Turing test
Is a computer indistinguishable from humans or not? What do we do if that were the case —> is there ethical concerns then?
What is the weak AI and strong AI thesis
Weak AI: computer is a useful tool for understanding human cognition
Strong AI: appropriately programmed computer has a mind
Systems theory
The theory that emerged as a reaction to the Chinese room thought experiment that said that even though the computer may not understand what it’s doing, the whole system (the room, the book, the person, the computer, etc) does understand what is it doing and therefore does kind of speak Chinese
What does the Fred thought experiment entail
Fred can see two different colors of red (red 1 and 2) and when looking at his brain we can find where this originates, but that does not mean we know what it is like to see the two colors —> in a physical description of the world things are missing that we cannot grasp
Describe the “Mary the color scientist” thought experiment
Mary has never seen colors but she’s studied them her whole life so knows everything about them. Do you think she would be surprised when she finally actually sees colors? Or not because she knows what happens in the brain etc when seeing colors?
Explain the hard problem and state who coined this term
David Chalmers; it is the question of how/why subjective experience is possible at all and how/why do physical things lead to subjective experiences —> the real problem (the hard problem; the problem of consciousness) is why do we have qualia at all
Explain the zombie thought experiment
We can perfectly imagine a twin of ourselves who is identical to us but without conscious experience/qualia (the zombie), the fact that we can imagine this and even a world full of people like that means that we cannot reduce consciousness to functionalism —> its something more
What is the cognitive closure hypothesis and who coined the term
Colin McGinn; he suggested that maybe our physical make-up just doesn’t allow us to understand the hard problem
What are the 3 criteria for when we usually speak of free will
- The intention of behavior precedes behavior
- The behavior wasn’t necessary (you could have done something else)
- The intention of behavior was the cause of the behavior
What is imputability
Being held accountable
What are 4 problems with reductive materialism
- Identity problem (type-type); brain research shows that often the same stimulus does not provoke exactly the same neural reaction
- Simulations of the mind as a by-product did not work (e.g. trying to build a brain-like structure and intelligence arising by itself)
- Neural plasticity; same mental functions can be performed by different brain areas
- Individual differences; brain have been proven to differ a lot between different people, especially the details
What are 2 problems with non-reductive materialism
- Identity problem (token-token); if multiple brain patterns can refer to the same mental state in different people/situations/etc. than there is no way to prove that they are the same mental state or to predict any mental states based on brain activity patterns
- It produces a weak theory that is difficult to test, because it is always true that a brain state is associated with a mental state but there is no way to prove how they are linked)
Who introduced identity theory
David Lewis
Who introduced the concept of multiple realizability
Jerry Fodor
Who came up with the Mary the color scientist thought experiment
Frank Jackson
What does it mean to be a compatibilist
It means believing in both free will and determinism
What are 4 things you can do to save free will
- Criticize libet’s experiments
- Maintain that physics doesn’t know everything neither does it fully describe the world
- Become a compatibilist
- Conceptualiseren free will as a phenomenon to be explained, not something that explains (explanatory entity)
