What is Meant by Mind Flashcards
What is the mind-body problem?
The mind-body problem is a philosophical issue concerning the relation and interaction between the mind and the physical body. It asks how mental states relate to physical processes in the body.
What do monists believe?
That only one type of substance exists (mental or physical).
What do dualists believe?
That two types of sustance exist (mental and physical).
What groups can we distinguish between in monist belief?
- Idealists/mentalists, hold that only mental exists,
- Materialists, hold that only physical exists.
What is interactionism?
The position that the mental and the physical do causally interact.
So, a non-interactionist position will maintain that they do not; for example, someone who thinks that there is no mental causation, of if they think there is, but that its effects are limited to the mental (that the effects of mental causation cannot be physical).
What is the most prominent difference between physical and mental?
- The physical clearly, as we commonly understand it, takes up space (Direct/indirect realist perspective),
- On the other hand, mental entities, states, and properties often seem to not take up space, especially from the human perspective.
Perhaps could maintain that thoughts hold ‘space’ within the memory, and that memory is held physically within certain parts of the brain.
What is privileged access?
No one can access my mind. Only I can have direct acquaintance with my thoughts and experiences. ‘No one can feel the pain I feel or see this redness ‘in my mind’ of the apple before me’.
This is some kind of first-person authority.
What is meant by immediacy?
E.g. The redness of the apple seems to be immediately, directly present in or to my mind.
This we might suggest, is distinct from the perception I have of an external object, or the knowledge I have of some external object or some fact about the world.
My relation to the external, it often seems, is not immediate and direct in the way that the mental is. Could evidence thought, belief, hope, feeling, emotion, imagination, or memory. It seems we have direct, immediate access to these when conscious of them.
How does Descartes understand the mental?
He thought of it as that which is composed of everything which we are conscious of. We could therefore say that this means that the mental is that of which we have subjective or awareness.
Furthermore, we can access this through introspection, a form of inner experience. It seems difficult to even think of how we would go about defining these qualities, relations, and mental acts such as that of introspection, in physical terms.
For Decartes, the mental was essential to our personal identity, he would have considered the very notion of an unconscious mental state to be an oxymoron; placing him against most modern thinkers.
What psychological theory goes against Descartes?
Freud’s psychodynamic approach. Freud maintains that the personality and ‘mind’ has unconscious, ‘unperceived’ elements (the id, ego, and super ego; unconscious, preconscious, and conscious mind). This would, against Descartes, imply that the mental is not just composed of everything we are conscious of.
What does Thomas Nagel argue?
- Maintains that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism - something it is like for the organism.’
- There is something it is like to be a bat, certain subjective, phenomenological properties, that we do not, and cannot, not being bats, have access to (assuming bats are conscious).
What are qualia?
Immediate qualities of experience, the way something seems or feels to you.
The phenomenal qualities of certain mental states.
Qualia applied to the mind-body problem?
How could the redness of the red apple, this redness being a quale of my experience, be explained in terms of neurons, synapses, and all other biological processes that the brain and body interact with.
This is not to say that such a materialist explanation is not possible. However, the immense difficulty of the tasks is often taken as evidence by dualists and idealists that the mental is not explicable in terms of the physical.
What is meant by intentionality?
This term was first systematically explored, in the modern era, by Brentano and Husserl.
By it, we mean the quality of an experience in that it is about something. It has content.
Intentionality is also characterised in terms of directedness, i.e. the idea that the mind is always directed towards something; it has some object which it is directed towards, and which forms part of the content which its thoughts, feelings, etc., are about.
In example, my perception that it is raining outside, my fear that it is raining outside, my imagination that it is raining outside, could all be said to have some content. They are all about the state of affairs, or possible fact, of it raining outside. We often call intentionality ‘aboutness’, or the ‘representational character’ of the mental.
How do qualia and intentionality relate?
When I perceive or conceive of a red apple, the phenomenal quality of what redness is subjectively like is not itself the content of the perception or thought.
I am thinking of a red apple, and I am thinking of it as red, but the redness itself is not the content, because it is not what the thought is about.
Therefore, it is important to understand that qualia are non-intentional. They are rather that through which we know the content of an experience when we have it.
What is meant by anomalousness/anomaly?
By ‘anomalousness of the mental’ we mean that the mental is, in some sense, lawless. Donald Davidson, the progenitor of this concept, thought that there were no scientific laws which linked and structured the mental.
Though, Davidson was an anomalous monist, he still maintained that it through this property that distinguishes the mental from the physical.
What example could be given against the lawfulness of the mental?
- When someone insults someone, at certain times they might become angry, lose control, and lash out, whereas at others they would not react at all, or would perhaps try to reason with them, asking them why they had insulted them,
- Many philosophers, however, do think that there are some things, like regularities, we can use to explain mental activity and behaviour.
What example can be given against the importance of the criteria of the mental (intentionality, anomalousness, qualia, etc.,)?
- Has been noted that we can think of some other things as not existing in space (and time): numbers, mathematical structures more broadly, theorems, etc. So then non-spatiality would not be a unique characteristic of the mental,
- Some argue that certain mental states are not immediately accessible,
- Some argue that certain mental states might be more accessible to others than the person who has them - e.g., the teenager who is convinced that they are in love,
- Some philosophers argue against the existence of qualia,
- Intentionality may characterise some, but not all mental states (e.g. pain). it also characterised some things which are not mental states. Therefore, while important, we might not say that it is characteristic,
- Some maintain that the theory that mental states are anomalous might seem to rely on an argument from ignorance, which is always dangerous when empirical knowledge and theoretical work has not sufficiently developed.
What is Plato’s dualist theory?
- Plato seemed to believe that the soul could exist after bodily death,
- He speaks of the virtuous soul as being rewarded after death,
- He continues by maintaining that philosophy is to prepare the soul for death, to allow it to eventually escape earthly existence,
- Existence of the body is here achieved through a type of gnosis leading to virtue.
