Minds and Bodies

An Introduction with Readings

Robert Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135640552
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Minds and Bodies is a clear introduction to the mind-body problem. It requires no prior philosophical knowledge and is ideally suited to newcomers to philosophy and philosophy of mind.
Robert Wilkinson carefully introduces the fundamental components of the philosophy of mind: Descartes's dualist account of mind and body; monist views including eliminativism; computer science and artificial intelligence. Each chapter is linked to a reading from key thinkers in the field, from Descartes to Paul Churchland.

Chapter

1 Introduction

OBJECTIVES

The overall objective of this chapter is to state the mind–body problem. By the end of your work on this chapter you should:

• be able to give a preliminary answer to the question: What do I believe about the nature of mind and its relation to the body?

• understand some of the major properties of the mental, notably mental causation; what it is to be a subject; privacy and privileged access;

• be able to say what the mind–body problem is.

This book is intended to be of interest to beginners or near-beginners in philosophy, and it has two main aims: the first is to introduce you to the mind–body problem, a central question in the branch of philosophy called the philosophy of mind; the second aim is to show you, by means of guided reading of primary source texts dealing with this problem, what is involved in reading a text from a philosophical point of view.

Let me say something about the second of these aims before getting on to the main business of the book. Reading a text from a philosophical point of view is somewhat different from reading it as would a student of literature or a student of history. Philosophy is the study of our most basic and general concepts and beliefs: the whole edifice of human thought rests on such concepts and beliefs that serve as its foundations, and it is the business of philosophy to identify and analyse them in a particular way, which we will see exemplified in what follows. The principal techniques used are the analysis of concepts and the deployment and evaluation of arguments – there will be many examples of both these techniques in this book, so I will not attempt here to define them – it is, in any case, much easier to grasp what is involved by means of examples. The point to fasten on for the moment is that, when reading a text philosophically, the aim is precisely to evaluate the arguments and conceptual analyses in it. Accordingly, reading a text philosophically is not reading about philosophy but in a real sense doing it. Indeed, critical reflection on written philosophy is one of the principal ways in which the subject proceeds, though it is not the only one. I doubt if many philosophers would disagree with the view that ‘live’ debate with other philosophers is equally important. These activities are indeed two sides of the same coin. As we will see repeatedly in what follows, philosophy proceeds by dialogue: by the advancing of an argument or analysis; by the putting forward of objections, and then (if possible) of replies to these objections, and so on. Accordingly, knowing how to read a text philosophically is an essential skill for any philosopher.

As a key means to fulfilling this second aim, exercises have been included throughout, and you should try to resist the temptation to skip them. They have a number of functions: to reinforce your understanding of the most important of the concepts and beliefs discussed; to give you practice in the close reading of a philosophical text, and to consolidate your grip on the fundamentals of philosophical reasoning. You will benefit much more if you try to do these exercises yourself before reading the specimen answers and/or discussions provided. To repeat: reading in this way is not just reading about philosophy but doing it.

It is important to note that reading philosophy in this way is not quick: philosophical texts are much more like dense plum cakes than soufflés: a little goes a long way and takes a while to digest. All philosophers, however expert, find the same. To my knowledge, nobody has yet devised a way of skim-reading a philosophical text and understanding it properly, so do not be either surprised or depressed if you find it takes you some time to understand this material – this is a good sign!

We can now turn to the substantive business of this book, a consideration of the question philosophers term the mind–body problem. In the remainder of this introduction I want to set out some basic considerations which will allow us to state the mind–body problem in a preliminary way, and to begin to see why it is a real problem.

In fact, it is not too much to say that the mind–body problem is one of the most intriguing in the whole of philosophy. Typically of such philosophical problems – for example, concerning the nature of time or the source of the power of music – the mind–body problem arises when we reflect philosophically on features of the world which normally we take for granted and hardly notice in the ordinary course of life. The mind–body problem arises when we begin to pay attention to what is in fact a most remarkable feature of human beings (and indeed a number of other forms of life as well), namely, that we are conscious or, as we usually say, that we have a mind as well as a body. When you really stop to think about this, it rapidly comes to seem much more puzzling than you might expect. We all have an intuitive understanding of what material objects or bodies are like; but if you ask yourself the question: Is my mind the same sort of thing as my body or not? – in other words: Is the mind an effect or property of the body or at least significantly like it? – then we are liable to stop short at once and be stuck for an answer. Perhaps many people would accept, for example, the view that the mind must at least depend on the body in some way, on the ground that there are regular (or as philosophers sometimes say ‘law-like’) correlations between states of my body (like putting my hand on a drawing pin) and states of my mind (a sharp pain). Again, bodily disorders often result in predictable mental disturbances: the fever brings on the delirium. Yet the fact (if it is a fact) that the mind might depend on the body in some way yet to be fully specified does not entail that the mind cannot be a quite different type of thing from the body. Dependency is logically quite compatible with distinctness. Informal reflections of this kind will start us off on our inquiry, but we find rapidly that they will not take us far along the road. In order to think about this matter to some purpose we need to do some philosophy.

We will begin our investigation in this Introduction with two steps: first, I will ask you to work out where you stand at the moment with regard to a basic question; and then I will set out some basic philosophical considerations about minds and bodies that will allow us to state the mind–body problem in a more detailed way and show why it is so intriguing and genuine a problem.

Put at its simplest, the question we are going to investigate is: What is the mind, and how is it related to the body? I now want you to work out roughly where you stand on this question at the moment, before you have investigated it from a philosophical point of view: to repeat, everyone has a basic intuition about this, and it is interesting, as a starting point, to tease it out. So, let us proceed by identifying your present basic idea about the mind–body question. Let me sketch out two different points of view, towards opposing ends of the spectrum of opinions which are taken on this issue.

POINT OF VIEW 1

The mind must be a very different sort of thing from the body. Many religions include the doctrine that it can and does live on, in some way, after the death of the body, and for that to be true minds¹ have to be very unlike bodies. After all, everything that is a material thing above the level of elementary particles is made of parts, and there is no material thing whose parts stay the same, or stay organized in the same way, forever. All material things change and decay, and all the living beings we know on earth – vegetable, animal and human alike – are mortal. They change and eventually they die. And so, if minds do not die, they must be very different sorts of things from bodies.

Again, you don’t have to be religious to believe this. People have out-of-body experiences, and these are so well attested they just can’t be ignored. Here is a typical report of such an experience:

It was a hot day and the air conditioner was on. After taking a shower I stretched out on the bed to cool off before dressing to leave the house. I did not fall asleep. I was not in the habit of taking naps in the afternoon and was very alert but thinking of nothing in particular that could recall later. One moment I was on the bed, the next I was standing away from the foot of the bed. The mirror of the dressing table was in my line of vision and I saw myself. The reflection looked like me, yet it did not. … It was as if I looked like myself but that I had been refined and my features made more regular … I was aware of the body on the bed but not interested in it … I was not a ‘body’ such as was on the bed; it was something I wore, in the same way that one wears clothes. I did not want to go back to my body and felt a sense of heaviness in relation to it.

I have met only one person who was able to verify such an experience. Her name is … When she was so ill she was not expected to live, she thought she had left her body and was looking down at the house (of course, much more details to it) and saw a garden hose on the roof. It was a flat-topped house they had just bought so that when she came to herself she knew that if there was such a hose up on the roof that she then had actually seen it. Not telling her husband why, she asked him to go up, and there was a hose to his surprise (a new one the last owners had forgotten).

(Tart in Ramakrishna 1993: 127–8)

In the light of experiences like these, it just isn’t plausible to say that the mind is in some way a material thing, because material things just don’t act like this. No other aspects or properties or bits of me can act in this way, so my mind must be a very different sort of thing from the rest of me.

POINT OF VIEW 2

The best guide to the way things are in the universe, in all its aspects, is science: it has worked better than any other method human beings have yet devised, and has made more true prophecies about the future than all the prophets there have ever been. What science has discovered is a universe of material things and forces in which extremely simple basic elements, like sub-atomic particles, have, over the unimaginable stretches of cosmic time, combined to form the extremely complex and richly varied universe we live in. Now, no scientific theory to date has included the idea of something so different in nature from matter that it escapes the conditions, like change and decay, which have been found to affect all complex material things. Even if we don’t know yet how the brain generates the mind, it’s a safe bet that it does generate it in some way, and that minds will turn out to be – in any sense of the word that is significant – material things. The peculiar out-of-body experiences just described are not enough evidence on their own to justify believing in minds that are not matter-dependent in some important way. After all, these experiences are really only like having a body that can do odd things such as flying: the people who have them always report visual sensations for instance, and if you really were detached from your body it isn’t likely that your experience would be anything like having sensations at all, because you would not have any sense organs. We don’t yet know how odd experiences like those described in Point of View 1 are to be accounted for, but the most probable assumption to work on is that some day we’ll find a neat biochemical explanation for them – maybe the wiring in a key bit of the brain goes haywire for a while, or the electrochemistry malfunctions. After all, the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe, with literally billions of connections and very complex processes going on in it all the time: small wonder if some of them go wonky now and again. One day we’ll work it out. You won’t get anywhere with this problem unless you take a scientific point of view, and that means not assuming there are ghostly things in the universe without much better reason than we’ve found so far.

EXERCISE 1.1

TWO POINTS OF VIEW

The first question to answer is this: To which of these alternative points of view are you broadly sympathetic at the moment, or are you currently a ‘don’t know’? Please note down your present point of view and keep it handy. We shall return to it at the end of the book.

DISCUSSION

I am not going to comment on the assertions in these points of view here: in a sense, everything we are now going to do for the rest of this book will be a commentary on these opposing outlooks. If you take the view, inherent in Point of View 1, that minds and bodies are very different sorts of thing, then you probably take some form of the point of view philosophers call dualism, and we will be looking closely at this in the next chapter. If, on the other hand, you are more sympathetic to Point of View 2, which includes the assertion that minds and bodies are fundamentally the same sort of thing, then you will believe a version of the view philosophers call monism (in this case materialistic monism), and we will spend some time investigating some versions of that outlook in Chapter 3, where all these technical terms are explained. However, you may – very reasonably – take the view that you are not sure about where you stand on this question at the moment. It may well appear to you – and you are by no means alone if this is so – that there is merit in both these points of view. This is a position in which many people find themselves when faced with this problem for the first time. The only way to proceed in such a case is to do what we are about to do, namely examine the arguments on both sides.

What we are going to do in this book is to take both these points of view very seriously indeed, and subject them to philosophical investigation. It is worth mentioning the point that philosophical studies of this kind are not, as they are sometimes alleged to be, ivory-tower pastimes – clever games for idle people in warm libraries or university departments, with no practical implications whatsoever. Take the following examples from our present area of study, the philosophy of mind. The first is as follows:

Over the centuries, human beings have given a number of different answers to the question: What are we to count as sentient beings – i.e. beings with some form of consciousness – capable of feeling, for example, pain and fear? What you believe about this question, together with your moral beliefs about rights and about obligations to minimize suffering (for example) has direct implications for the way you behave in treating the rest of the universe. Descartes – whose philosophy of mind we will come to presently – believed that, so far as life on earth is concerned, consciousness is a property only of human beings, and that other animals are automata, no different in principle from clockwork dolls. A direct consequence of this view is that there is no moral ground on which to disapprove of vivisection or hunting since automata do not feel pain: the rabbit I infect or blind with cosmetics or agonize with electrodes, or the fox torn apart by dogs, is no more the subject of pain and fear than a car disassembled by a mechanic.

Second, many philosophers have thought that only if dualism is true can human beings be said to have freedom of the will: the material world (it is argued) is a realm of inexorable causal sequences with no room in it for freedom of choice in any meaningful sense – if what I experience as my choices are just neuronal functionings, are they not just as rigorously determined as the boiling of a kettle of water over a flame? If the mental is a distinct realm from the physical, outside the network of physical causes (it has been argued), perhaps this rigorous determinism can be avoided. (I should add that though this is a widespread view, it is by no means universally held: other philosophers hold that the question of free will is logically independent of the question of the nature of the mental.)

My final example is less controversial and it is simply this: what you believe about the nature of the mind or soul has a very direct bearing on how it is rational and moral for you to behave. If you believe in the immortality of the soul, and that this life is merely a prelude to a timeless life after death, then it is quite possible for you rationally to take a very different attitude to setbacks in this life from that of someone who believes this life is all there is. On the other hand, for those who believe in the mortality of the mind or soul, the quality of life here and now is, quite rationally, a matter of consistent urgency.

MINDS AND BODIES: SOME BASICS

One of the most difficult things which everyone finds when beginning philosophy is to understand what the given problem is: in our case, the question of the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. We can add a supplementary question here as well, one which has been debated, literally, for centuries:Why is it, apparently, so hard to settle? In a sense it will take the whole of this book to answer that question. However, we can begin to see why there is a deep problem here if we start by getting clear about some of the basic features or properties of the two terms of the problem – the mind (or the mental) and the body (or the material or physical, which are synonyms, and used interchangeably). I want now to reflect on a few basic features of each, in a not too technical way. We can refine our understanding of these ideas as we go along, but we need to get a basic grip on the ideas which follow now, as they are taken as read by all the philosophers whose ideas we are going to consider.

As I have said, like many philosophical questions, the mind–body problem arises when we begin to reflect in a philosophical way on some concepts which are entirely familiar to us: namely, those concepts in which we in daily life describe our mental life and those we use to describe the material universe. We will begin with the mind, and return to the material world presently. We can profitably begin our investigation of the mind by reminding ourselves of some facts about daily human mental experience. Human mental experience in our normal waking state consists of self-conscious awareness of the different types of phenomena which philosophers refer to as mental contents. (In one way, this is an unfortunate term since it might be thought to imply that the mind is some odd sort of container, but that is not the intention at all. Mental contents are just the sorts of things we are ordinarily aware of in ordinary daily conscious life. The term implies nothing about the nature of these contents or the mind.) First, we are aware of the sensations furnished by our five senses which inform us of some feature of the world other than our own bodies – sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations of touch. There are also bodily sensations which inform us of our own physical condition, from intense pleasure to a generali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Dualism
• 3 Monism
• 4 Artificial Intelligence
• 5 Conclusion
• Readings
• Reading 1 Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body are Demonstrated Meditation I
• Reading 2 Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body are Demonstrated Meditation II
• Reading 3 Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body are Demonstrated Meditation VI
• Reading 4 ‘The passions of the soul' Part I
• Reading 5 ‘Sensations and brain processes'
• Reading 6 The mind–body problem Sydney Shoemaker
• Reading 7 ‘Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes'
• Reading 8 ‘Is the brain's mind a computer program?' No. A program merely manipulates symbols, whereas a brain attaches meaning to them
• Reading 9 ‘Consciousness and objective reality'
• Revision test
• Answers to revision test
• Bibliography
• Index