Lesson 3 Flashcards
Descartes link with Christianity
-Descartes believed in a Christian view of the soul/mind and of the afterlife.
-This means that his theory supports the belief in grace (that people get eternal life in heaven through belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus) and that he believes that God will raise the souls in a spiritual resurrection.
-In his view, the mind/soul comes from God.
According to Descartes how can the mind and body interact?
-how if they are radically different, can mind and body interact?
-Descartes suggested that the pineal gland, a small portion of the brain that lies between the two hemispheres, was the point at which the mind controlled the body.
What is wrong with Descartes trying to use pineal gland
-This suggestion does not work because locating mind-brain interaction anywhere in the brain solves nothing.
-It merely says it interacts here but does nothing to show how interaction takes place.
-If the self is a separate mental thing it is difficult to see how we could ever establish the way in which it engages with the physical world.
-Descartes was intrigued by the pineal gland because at the time he was writing its function was unknown.
Modern science of anatomy shows it is associated with the production of melatonin which regulates sleep rhythms. Remember, Descartes was working with 17th century science.
Physicalism
-Physicalism is the philosophical position that everything can be explained and described in terms of matter.
-If everything is explained by matter, then soul is not needed to explain the nature of a person.
-there is no body/soul relationship according to a physicalist for the simple reason that there is no soul.
Physicalism as reductive
-Physicalism is a reductive Philosophy
-The mind can be reduced to the brain - the brain is physical and empirically verifiable.
Physicalism obvious explanation for common phenomena
-Physicalism seems to give an obvious explanation to common phenomena, for example…
• As people reach old age they tend to become forgetful and even suffer with diseases such as dementia. This can be shown in terms of brain activity and progressive brain deterioration.
• If I take alcohol or other drugs, I may experience myself and my surroundings in a way that does not correspond with reality afterwards, I may accept that my senses were impaired but at the time that is exactly how things seemed.
• Tiredness may make our reactions slower and stop us from thinking straight.
These suggest that what we experience is related to straight forward physical causes and that science can provide answers to all the significant questions about life.
Functionalism
-Functionalism is an example of a physicalist theory of the mind.
-Philosophers tend to talk of mind rather than soul making the problem mind/body rather than body/soul.
How did functionalism develop?
-As a theory, it developed out of cognitive science specifically the field of artificial intelligence where the mind is seen as an information processing system, essentially as a working computer programme.
Function of mind (functionalism)
-The function of the mind is what it does - it process’s data inputted through the senses and generates an appropriate outcome in a human being the platform on which it does this is the human brain.
-E.g. when we are cold we may outwardly and physically show this with goosepimples or blue lips, this is a physical reaction and outcome that our body produces as a result of the sensory data it has received.
Functionalism - computer
-Some functionalists even go so far as to suggest but it is possible that a mind could run on a physical platform such as a computer.
-In a human being, input would be the sense experience, function would be the processing carried out by the brain output would be behaviour.
In summary, functionalism disregards the concept of a ‘mental substance’.
Input
Processing
Output
-Mental states are merely sensory inputs and behaviour outputs.
-Human minds should be seen as our powerful biological computers.
All physicalist theories show that there are major problems with a dualist approach to the mind body dilemma.
-Why? If mental substance is something different from physical substance, then there seems no way that they can interact - a point which Ryle attempted to make with his ‘Ghost in the Machine’ concept.
-Physicalist theories make an obvious but valid point when stating that if there are no physical bodies then there are no mines because a mind is fundamentally linked to matter.
-There seems to be no doubt that mind altering drink and drugs can affect the way the mind thinks - could this they argued against Descartes second proof, the argument from divisibility and non divisibility?
Dualism in some form is still valid
-Most dualists today think that dualism is obviously true. This is because matter does not exclusively control our mines, rather our minds control our thoughts and our bodies.
-Dualism is still the most popular religious approach to the mind
-Dualism is compatible with conventional religious thought for example, Christians believe that humans have souls and they can survive the death of the body. Even their concept of God being a thinking bodyless existence may suggest but the soul (or self) can also be independent a physical matter.
Ev for dualism in NDE
-There is some evidence for dualism in accounts of near death experiences.
-This is because near death experiences almost often understood by those who have had them and by some who investigate them scientifically to be evidence for the existence of a soul that survives death.
The qualia argument
-To refer to qualia is to ask ‘what is it like?’ this can be a subjective and personal question.
-This suggests the qualia have to be experienced, push back neurological states of the brain as we cannot fully explain what qualia are, they must be personally experienced.
-This is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
-The main point to take from this is that consciousness implies that dualism in some respect or form is true.
-For example Wittgenstein said ‘when try describing the smell of a cup of coffee’ nobody could experience that smell by hearing a description of it.
Thomas Nagel: what is it like to be a bat
-Nagel’s position is clear.
-All mammals have conscious experiences and those conscious experiences occur in countless different forms that are unimaginable to us.
-The ‘what-it-is-like-ness’ of a bat’s subjective experience is alien to us: for example, we move around aided by vision, whereas bats use a kind of sonar - echolocation - and we can have no idea of what that feels like.
-But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.
-Whatever organism we are talking about, be it bat, human or other, what it is like to be that organism cannot be reduced to a physical description or to an account of its functional states, so no physicalist theory (even Functionalism) can explain qualia in purely physical terms.
