Drs. Deutsch and Mallon
Leture 5, Notes, 25/09/02
I. The mind-body problem: What is the nature of the relation between the mind and the body-and-brain? Why a problem? On the one hand, the mind possesses features which, it seems, are not and could not be, possessed by mere physical stuff: phenomenology, infallible first-person knowledge, consciousness, meaning, rationality, freedom, self-awareness. How could a pain be a mere arrangement of molecules? On the other hand, the mind can’t be conceived of as lying completely outside the physical realm. Minds have some sort of spatio-temporal location; minds have all sort of causal connections to physical things and events; Minds evolve from mere matter. These incline us to think that the mind must be physical. Thus the problem: the mind could not, but must, be physical.
A. The traditional responses to the mind-body problem: Dualism and Materialism
1. Dualism: the view that the mind is different in essential nature from the body.
a. Some arguments for dualism
(i) The argument from doubt: I can doubt the
existence of my body. But when I doubt the existence of my body I don’t thereby doubt my own existence. In fact, it’s impossible for me to doubt my own existence. So I am not my body. But what am I? A thinking thing--a mind. So this mind that is me is not just a body+a brain.
(ii) The argument from conceivable post-mortem survival: I can conceive of surviving past the death of my body and brain. So my essential nature must be different from that of my body and brain. My essential nature is mental. So the essential nature of the mental must be different from that of the body and brain.
(iii) The argument from the conceivability of zombies: It is conceivable that there could be a creature physically identical to me down to the last micro-particle yet lacking all of my mental properties entirely. Hence the mental must be essentially different from the physical.
b. Some objections to dualism
(i) Some dualists are “substance-dualists”—they believe that one’s mental properties inhere in a kind of stuff, but that this stuff is immaterial. One problem with substance dualism is that it is difficult to form a clear conception of what this immaterial stuff is like.
(ii) Dualists “seal off” the mind from the physical realm and the connections between the two realms becomes a mystery.
(iii) Dualists seem stuck with causal-overdetermination or epiphenomenalism.
(iv) The possibility of disembodiment is hard to stomach. (McGinn’s odd reason for saying so: We’ll have to accept the possibility of disembodied rat and pig minds)
2. Materialism: The view that there is nothing but physical stuff, the mind
being simply a particular, complex arrangement of physical stuff.
a. A main motivation for materialism: Materialism is the metaphysics of modern science and science has been spectacularly successful. Science needs nothing but physical entities and properties for its explanations and so if we are to accept that the mind or its properties are nonphysical, we had better have very good reasons, but we don’t (the arguments for dualism are bad).
b. Some arguments for materialism
(i) The argument from correlation: Mental states of specific types are correlated with physical states of specific types. One simple explanation for these correlations is that the mental state types just are the physical state types. If we deny this then we must explain why the correlations exist.
(ii) The argument from interaction: Mind and body causally interact. If the mind is nonphysical it takes up no space it, it isn’t in contact with any physical body…what does it mean to say that such a thing causally interacts with physical bodies? That has no meaning. So if there is mind-body interaction, the mind is physical.
(iii) The argument from the implausibility of causal overdetermination/ epiphenomenalism: There is reason to believe that the physical world is causally closed, i.e. that every physical event has a wholly physical cause/explanation. But if there is mental-to-physical causation, and the mind is nonphysical, then there is rampant causal overdetermination. Rampant overdetermination is implausible, so the mind is physical. A dualist could deny that there is any mental-to-physical causation (this view is known as epiphenomenalism), but this seems to be obviously false.