P&R Block 3

Question 1

What is the Mind-Body problem?

Answer 1

• How is the mind related to the body?
• What properties, functions, and occurrences should be regarded as mental or physical respectively?

Question 2

What does ontological mean?
What about ontic?

Answer 2

Ontological is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
An ontic philosophy relates to REAL existence rather than PHENOMENAL existence.

Question 3

What does epistemic mean?

Answer 3

Epistemic: relating to knowledge. I.e: in QM, the wavefunction as an expression of our knowledge of a system rather than a real object.

Question 4

Why is it reasonable to suggest that physics is applicable to the mind-body problem?

Answer 4

• The brain constitutes matter, which is describable with physical laws.
• We can observe brain function using fMRI / EEG.

However, a reductionist approach is probably misguided given that chemistry cannot even be successfully reduced to physics. The brain is a highly complex system.

Question 5

What is Synergetics?
Who initially proposed this?

Answer 5

Haken.
The theory of self-organising emergent phenomena in complex systems. Pattern formation. Spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Question 6

What are three key questions of philosophy of mind?

Answer 6

What is the relationship between minds and bodies?
What makes minds distinct? (personal identity)
Does consciousness exist before/after death?

Question 7

What is substance dualism?

Answer 7

Two distinct substances, brain and mind.
Plato: ideal world / material world.
Descartes: thinking substances / extended substances.

Question 8

What is property dualism?
Give two types of property dualism.

Answer 8

Mind and brain are formed of one substance with multiple properties.

• Elemental: mind is a physical property of all matter - Panpsychism.
• Emergent: mind is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems - Emergent Dualism.

Question 9

What are 4 dualist theories of mind-body interaction.
To whom are they attributed?

Answer 9

Interactionism (Descartes)
Parellelism (Leibniz)
Occasionalism (Malebranche)
Epiphenomenalism (La Mettrie)

Question 10

What is interactionism? (as a dualist theory of brain-mind interaction)

Answer 10

(Descartes)
Mind and body interact in both directions.

Question 11

What is parallelism? (as a dualist theory of brain-mind interaction)

Answer 11

(Leibniz)
Mind and body operate on parallel causal chains, but do not interact. They are correlated via “pre-established harmony”.

Question 12

What is epiphenomenalism? (as a dualist theory of brain-mind interaction)

Answer 12

(La Mettrie)
Body interacts with mind, but mind does not interact with body.

Question 13

Why did Materialism overtake dualism as the dominant philosophy of mind?

Answer 13

Due to the advent of neuroscience in the late 1800s.
e.g. the case of Phineas Gage (guy with metal rod through his head - personality changed) showing the physical brain affects personality.

Question 14

What are 4 materialist philosophies of mind?
To whom are they attributed?

Answer 14

Behaviourism (Skinner)
Identity theory / Material reductivism (Smart)
Eliminativism (Churchland)
Functionalism (Putnam)

Question 15

What is behaviourism?

Answer 15

(Skinner)
Mental events are descriptions of organic behaviours, consciousness is characterised only by behaviours associated with consciousness.

Question 16

What is identity theory?

Answer 16

(Smart)
Mental events are identical to brain events.

Question 17

What is eliminativism?

Answer 17

(Churchland)
Mental language should simply be removed from our vocabulary.

Question 18

What is functionalism?

Answer 18

(Putnam)
Mental states do not depend on their physical constitution, but on their function: causal relations to stimuli, other mental states, and behaviour.

Question 19

What does Searle mean by “Causal reductionism does not imply ontological reductionism”?

Answer 19

Mind processes are causally due to physical processes in the brain. However, mind processes can be usefully seen as entities in their own right, for the purpose of modelling.

Question 20

What do “a priori” and “a posteriori” mean?

Answer 20

A priori: arising from theory, independently of experience.
A posteriori: arising from experience/phenomenology.

Question 21

What are “qualia”?

Answer 21

The qualitative feeling of phenomenal distinctions within an experience (for example, seeing a colour, hearing a sound or feeling a pain).

Question 22

How are questions related to consciousness separated into “easy” and “hard” problems?
Who proposed this separation?

Answer 22

(Chalmers)
Easy problems are those that are expected to be amenable to scientific inquiry: i.e: how brain dynamics leads to conscious functions.
Hard problems are usually related to the relation between physical brain and qualia/subjective experience.

Question 23

What is EEG?
How can this be used to characterize consciousness?

Answer 23

Electroencephalography - measurement of rhythms of electrical potentials in neurones.
Higher frequencies (“gamma” range) are associated with conscious processes.

Question 24

If subliminal processing is characterized by “feed-forward” linear processing, how might conscious processing be characterised?

Answer 24

Top-down, recurrent processing.

Question 25

What is the difference between a coma and a vegetative state?
What is a minimally conscious state?

Answer 25

Coma: no response to stimulus, no voluntary actions.
Vegetative state: no awareness, but spontaneous behaviour and response to stimuli.
MCS: awareness of self/environment, in a severely reduced capacity.

Question 26

What are 3 key aspects of neuron function?

Answer 26

• Membrane potential must reach threshold voltage to initiate action potential (“all-or-nothing”).
• Spatial and Temporal summation can contribute to action potential being initiated.
• There is a refractory period after each action potential.

Question 27

Who initially mathematically/electronically modelled neuron function?

Answer 27

Hodgkin and Huxley

Question 28

What is integrated information theory (IIT)?

Answer 28

Consciousness is characterised by the causal relations between elements of a system. “Integrated information” is defined. Implies that consciousness is a spectrum, which is also suggested by observations of conscious patients with large amount of damaged brain matter.