The problem of consciousness Flashcards
What is the mind brain problem?
issue of how the mind
is related to the brain
What three main views are related to the mind-brain problem
dualism, materialism and functionalism
What is meant by materialism?
The second approach states that the mind is nothing but a by-product of the biological processes taking place in a particular brain. This view is called materialism.
What is the functionalist view?
The third approach says that the mind is indeed realised in a brain, but that it could be copied to any other brain, just like information on a computer can be copied to other machines. This is the functionalist view.
What is meant by the mind?
aggregate of faculties humans (and animals) have to perceive, feel, think, remember and want
Name two philosophers which subscribed to the idea of dualism
Plato and Descartes
What was Plato’s view on the soul?
Plato maintained that the soul exists before, and survives the body. Human souls were made of the leftovers of the soul of the cosmos and travelled between the cosmos and the human bodies they temporarily inhabited. Because human souls were part of the cosmos-soul, they had knowledge of the perfect realm that contained the eternal, ideal forms of which the worldly objects were but imperfect reflections filled with error. By focusing on the innate knowledge of their immortal soul, humans could get access to the true ideas.
What was Descartes’ view on the soul and how it was related to the body?
humans were composed of a divine soul in a sophisticated body (sometimes referred to as ‘the ghost in the machine’). The soul was immaterial and formed the thinking part of the person. Descartes believed that the soul brought divine information to humans and, therefore, that people had innate knowledge, which they could recover through deductive reasoning.
What is meant by cartesian dualism?
current-day philosophers use the term Cartesian dualism to refer to theories in which the mind is seen as radically different from the body and as independent of the biological processes in the brain. Dualism in philosophical writings does not make reference to the mind’s fate after the body’s death, however, though this issue is central to religious writings.
Why does dualism have an intuitive appeal according to the book? (2)
because it puts conscious information processing at the centre of our functioning and it gives us the feeling of being in control of our actions.
What is meant by our consciousness?
word referring to the private, first-person experiences an individual lives through; contains all the mental states
a person is aware of
What is meant by free will?
situation in which individuals can choose their course of action; choice is the outcome of an informed deliberation
According to Walyer what three conditions must be met before an action can be ascribed to free will
● The agent must have been able to do otherwise. Free will only exists when there is a choice.
● The act must originate in the agent, not in some external force.
● The act must be the outcome of rational deliberation (acts that are erratic and
unpredictable are not seen as free).
What is meant by the interaction problem?
A first problem for dualism was how to explain the mechanisms by which an independent mind (or soul) can influence the body.
What other problems did Descartes and dualism face? (4)
The existence of unconscious control processes (mental functions outside of consciousness + sleep), The disappearance of mystery forces in the scientific world & how brain damage affected consciousness & the Causal closure problem
What German mathematician and diplomat disagreed with Descartes and where did he disagree with him? (2)
Leibniz (1646–1716) thought that the human mind could not be limited to conscious thinking, because ‘there is in us an infinity of perceptions . . . of which we are unaware because the impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own’. Leibniz disagreed with Descartes that the universe could be thought of as a machine. Instead he compared it to a living organism. The building blocks were not material particles, but energy-laden and soul-invested units, which Leibniz called monads.
Leibniz made a distinction between four types of monads, name and describe these four types of Monads
- Simple monads formed the bodies of all matter (organic and inorganic). They had some type of unconscious and unorganised perception, and they were motivated by a tendency to keep in line with the existing, pre-established harmony of the universe.
- Sentient monads were present in all living organisms, but not in inorganic material. They had capacities for feeling pleasure and pain, and for the voluntary focusing of attention. However, they lacked the ability to reason about their experiences.
- Rational monads corresponded to the conscious minds of humans. They possessed the capacity of apperception, the faculty not only to perceive but also to reflect upon what is perceived.
- The supreme monad controlled and motivated all other monads. This in Leibniz’s eyes was the omniscient and omnipotent God of Christian religion.
What was apperception based on according to Leibniz?
Apperception according to Leibniz was not entirely based on empirical evidence, but also on innate truths. The latter could be inferred from the fact that humans sometimes felt absolutely sure about a phenomenon (e.g. a mathematical or geometric law). Such certainty could never be based on perception alone; it was innate knowledge demonstrated by perception.
How are these monads related to our consciousness?
human consciousness was not aware of the activity of the simple monads and, to a large extent, of the sentient monads. Still, these monads could motivate human behaviour
Influenced by Leibniz, who at some point also started to wonder how much wider human knowledge was than the part people were conscious of? How did he refer to these unconscious processes?
Kant thought of the unconscious representations as dark representations (‘dun- kele Vorstellungen’) and devoted a complete section to them in his 1798 book Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. At the same time, Kant seems to have been puzzled (bothered?) by the door to the ‘dark’ he had opened and he left the unconscious representations out of his ‘more serious’ philosophical writings, because he could not integrate them within his overall philosophical system trying to reconcile realism with idealism.
Another reason why dualism lost its appeal was that it needed the existence of an immaterial, mysterious, animistic ‘soul’. Explain why this was problematic for scientists given recent developments
Scientists had bad experiences with such entities, which to them looked more like relics from the pre-scientific world with its animistic explanations than building blocks of a sound scientific theory. There were a number of examples of such mysterious ‘substances’ that had been postulated in science before but which in the end turned out to be materialistic phenomena that could be measured and manipulated by the scientists.
Name two prime examples of such mysterious ‘substances’ that had been postulated in science before but which in the end turned out to be materialistic phenomena that could be measured and manipulated by the scientists.
The first substance was phlogiston. This had been invoked in the seventeenth century to explain why some materials easily caught fire whereas others did not catch fire at all. The idea was that flammable materials contained a substance, called phlogiston, which was released during burning. Materials without the substance were not combustible. Experimentation, however, called the phlogiston theory into question. For instance, it was found that materials sometimes weighed more after being burned than before. It was also found that fire depended on the availability of oxygen.Once the combustion processes were known, the phenomenon of fire was understood and could be controlled. As a result, fire lost its mystery.
The second mystery substance that in the end turned out not to exist was the vital force. This force had been postulated to explain why some organisms were living and others not. Like many other animistic explanations, the vital force stayed nearly unquestioned until the seventeenth century. A defining moment in its demise was the realisation that it was possible to make living (organic) matter out of non-living (inorganic) components. Another important insight was that all living things were composed of cells that grew out of previous cells. This discovery was made possible by the invention and optimisation of the microscope.
what did the Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1981) claim to be true about consciousness?
For Churchland, consciousness and the associated opinions were examples of folk psychology.
What is the view regarding free will according to Richard Dawkins (1976/2006)? Describe his arguments (3)
the evolutionary theory was misunderstood in the first century after its introduction by Darwin. Whereas everyone assumed natural selection was about the survival of individuals (in their offspring) and species, the selection actually concerns the survival of DNA molecules. Dawkins points out that the contribution of individuals to their offspring rapidly dilutes after a few generations, making it impossible that something ‘biological’ of an individual is preserved. Similarly, he points out that throughout history life forms have come and gone, to be replaced by others that were better adapted to the (changed) circumstances. So, species do not survive either. The only things that have remained constant throughout are the genes that make up the living organisms. They are the true survivors, and they have managed to mobilise a whole range of survival machines that keep them alive and enable them to multiply.
Describe two issues facing materialism
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 realisation in the brain differs.
Nobody has a convincing idea of how the human mind could be a by-product of the biological processes in the brain.
What attempt was made at solving the latter problem? (Nobody has a convincing idea of how the human mind could be a by-product of the biological processes in the brain.)
Researchers were convinced that if they built a brain-like computer they would automatically get an intelligent machine, returning a particular input into a desired output on the basis of self-learning. There was no need for them to define the meaning of the input or to detail the operations to be performed, however, the cybernetic attempts along these lines resulted in failure. At the same time, another type of machine turned out to be much more successful. This consisted of rather simple computers (Turing machines) that were able to store information in binary code (memory units turned on or off) and that could execute algorithms on this information on the basis of sequences of instructions given. In addition, the instructions could be run on each and every computer compatible with them, indicating that there was a distinction between the machine (the hardware) and the information processed by the machine (the software)
Because humans using the materialistic approach were increasingly compared to robots, controlled by their biology, it was normal for philosophers of mind to keep a close eye on the developments in artificial intelligence. One particular finding in this discipline had far-reaching consequences for ideas about the human mind. What was this finding? (2)
Information can be thought of as a realm separate from the medium upon which it is realised. Whereas cybernetics at first tried to make individual machines function like human minds, in line with materialism, real advancement consisted of rather simple machines on which information could be manipulated in binary form. In addition, although this information had to be processed on a computer and, therefore, depended on the functioning of the machine, it could easily be copied to other computers or even to completely different devices
The first outcome of the understanding that information forms a device-independent realm was that it provided an answer to which problem regarding mind-body?
The identity problem; because information in operational computers was independent of the precise ways in which it had been realised (as long as it retained the binary symbols and the Boolean transformations), the physical changes by which computers code zeros and ones and worked with them did not really matter. Similarly, the minute physiological changes that accompany a particular human experience may not be important, as long as they preserve the information code. The same information can be realised and communicated in multiple ways.
Name and describe the school of philosophy that this gave rise to
functionalism; in philosophy, view about the relationship between the mind and brain that considers the mind as a separate layer of information implemented on a Turing machine; predicts that the mind can be copied onto another Turing machine
How were these philosophical functionalists similar to psychological functionalists around 1900?
Just as functionalists in psychology around 1900 studied the functions of the mind rather than the nature of the mind, so functionalists in philosophy from the 1970s onwards examined the functions of information, rather than the precise ways in which the information was realised.
To understand what hunger is, they argued, it is not necessary to know what neurophysiological mechanisms make the phenomenon possible, but what they do to the organism.
What was the point of the teleportation experiment?
illustrates the difference between functionalism on the one hand and Cartesian dualism and materialism on the other.
What position does the Canadian psychologist Keith Stanovich defend in his book “The robot’s rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin”?
That humans escaped the tyranny of the biological
make-up, because they assembled matter-independent information; In other words, the fact that humans can encode, store, retrieve and manipulate information enables them to pursue intentions that need not coincide with those of the genes.