MINDS/SOULS AND BODIES
SOME
QUESTIONS:
What do you think the soul is, and how is it
related to the body? Why would you want
to believe there is such a thing as a soul?
What does 'matter' mean? Is the body really just a machine? Does the body feel, does it feel pain and
pleasure? Does it smile? Laugh? Cry? Get
depressed? Or does only the mind get depressed or feel pain or laugh or
cry? How can you cry without tears? Or laugh or smile without a face?
Where is your toothache? In your tooth or in your brain?? mind?? If it's only in your mind then you should go
to the psycho not to the dentist?
Can computers think? What would it prove if they could? If computers could think, would this prove
there was no mind or soul? Or would it
just demonstrate that ‘matter’ in certain configurations gives rise to or
provokes the emergence of soul or mind?
Some reading for starters:
(A)Traditional
positions:
1. DUALISM, sometimes called 'dualist interactionism': Plato,
The most cogent philosophical reason for dualism
is a perception that various features of the universe, or of the behaviour of
certain constituents of the universe such as human beings and the higher
animals, are beyond the capacity of mere matter. Matter, it appears, is not capable of
explaining the dynamism perceptible everywhere in the universe and particularly
in living things; nor is it capable of
explaining its own order. Still less is
it capable of explaining the intelligence and creativity of human beings and
other advanced animals. By no stretch of
the imagination is it capable of explaining thought, awareness or consciousness
and self-awareness, no matter how well organized. Even computers, arguably, don't think, no
more than does a slide rule or an abacus or a mechanical calculator. These differ in degree, not in kind. They don't think, they are not conscious,
they all just churn over. [This latter
point is well brought out by the contemporary philosopher John Searle, in a
argument called the Chinese Room thought experiment. However, the situation is very complicated,
and takes us to the heart of contemporary mind-brain debates.]
If
this is the way things are with matter, it would seem that there has to be an
entirely different kind of stuff around, psyche or anima or soul, to explain
the dynamism in things and especially in living things, especially the fact
that the dynamism is ordered and intelligent, culminating in human beings with
their intelligence and creativity and free will. Or at least to explain thought, the awareness
and self-awareness to be found in human beings (Descartes and most modern
dualists). When thought of as the
principle or source or foundation in us of thought and intelligence and freedom
in human beings, we are more likely to
use another word for this reality, the word 'mind', in Greek 'nous', in Latin,
'mens' (as in 'mental').
Once
you make them into different things there are various ways of conceiving the
relationship between soul and body: the soul is in the body as a pilot in a
ship, or perhaps as a prisoner in a prison, can't wait to die and go to heaven,
though one certainly does not have to have this dismal a concept of the body in
order to be a dualist. The important
idea is that the soul is a separate thing to the body and even a separate kind
or variety of thing. Finally, in so far
as the soul is a separate substance or thing in its own right, there is going
to be little trouble with survival after death.
Death = the separation of soul and body, like a divorce which happens
when the body breaks down to the point of being no longer a fit place to be
inhabited by or to interact with a soul.
We
need to distinguish at least two
different forms of dualism, however:
(a) Platonic
dualism, as in Plato, Augustine, Bonaventure and most
theologians prior to
(b) Cartesian dualism: the focus is entirely on thought, awareness and self-awareness, which
for Descartes himself seems to be confined to human beings. There are two kinds of things, res cogitans,
things which think, and res extensa, things which take up space. I am a thing which thinks, sum res
cogitans. The body meanwhile is a piece
of complicated machinery. Body and mind
or soul causally interact with each other according to Descartes via the pineal
gland = a gland in the brain in respect of which Descartes did not know any
bodily function for. Other animals are
just bits of machinery in their entirety -- they don't have souls or minds,
they are not conscious, they don't feel pain etc., so you don't have to worry
about vivisection or animal rights or anything like that.
The
main argument for dualism is premised on a conception of 'matter' as in its own
right something fairly passive, together with our experience of ourselves. Indeed, the more passive your idea of matter
the more tempting and indeed inevitable some form of dualism becomes as a way
of making sense of the full data of experience about the way things actually
are. 'Matter' in itself for its part is
no more clear or self-explanatory a concept than is 'mind' or 'soul'. This is something that people often overlook. In typical use, 'matter' is just a word with
people throw about in order to cover a gap.
The English word is derived from the Latin, 'materia', which translates
the Greek, 'hyle'. Both 'materia' and 'hyle' started life as words for the
trunk of a tree, the 'mother-wood' so to speak (mater, mother), which you use
as building material, as distinct from the branches, lignum, which you use for
fire-wood. The philosophical usage is by
way of a metaphorical extension of this more primitive use. Perhaps the metaphorical origins of the
concept already prejudice us into thinking of building material, wood, bricks,
morter, as the paradigm case of what matter is -- dead, lifeless, stuff which
by itself will never come to anything.
Similarly with the human
body. If you think of a human body as a
pure object, just a complicated machine, then it becomes almost inevitable that
we invent something else to have feelings and be self-aware. But maybe our problem is with a faulty
concept of the human body in the first place.
Maybe the body is not such a dull, passive thing after all.
Dualism
of any kind will face a number of other problems:
1) How to explain the interaction between two such diverse kinds of
things? Some possibilities:
·
‘Occasionalism’ (often
associated with the 17th C. philosopher Malebranche): on the
occasion of my willing to lift my hand, God makes it move.
·
‘Pre-established Harmony’
(Leibniz): mind and body are like two clocks wound up to keep the same time.
·
‘Parallelism’ (Spinoza): mind
and body don’t interact, they move in parallel streams, with what happens in
one being reflected in the other.
The view of Spinoza, however,
is also capable of being construed as a version of a position in between
dualism and monism called ‘dual-aspect identity theory’: mind and body are one
thing, with two different properties or aspects, roughly what is experienced
from within versus what is seen from without.
See later, under Contemporary Mind-Brain Debate.
2) How to explain the arising of Mind in the first place, starting with dead and vacuous matter. This is more of a problem for post Cartesian philosophy than for ancient and medieval Platonism for whom Psyche is a cosmic reality to start with before it becomes enclosed in human flesh.
In the long term, the only truly plausible solution may be that matter is not so vacuous after all: see above.
2. MATERIALISM: in spite of having a relatively
low conception of matter, one can be brave and just deny that there is anything
else.
In the Ancient World, the
clearest example of this position is that of the Greek and Roman Atomists,
Lucippus and Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius: soul atoms, the smoothest and most subtle of
all atoms, perception as in seeing, hearing etc. as atoms coming from outside
and causing agitations in the soul atoms.
But even the Atomists are not completely consistent, in some places
endowing soul atoms with self-movement, if for no other reason than to explain
random thoughts.
In
modern times, Hobbes was a materialist, as were some of the French Philosophes
in the 18th Century.
Materialism results when people take just the bottom half of Descartes
and try to do without the top half.
One ‘advantage’ of
materialism is that it seems to make the whole universe, including also human
beings, scientifically explicable, meaning by ‘science’ natural science and
eventually physics. The only difficulty
is whether natural science has itself dispensed with the crude conceptions of
matter that dominated modern science in its early stages. At this point we may need to distinguish
between ‘physicalism’ = physics can explain everything, including mind, and
‘eliminative materialism’ = there is no such thing as mind.
Many,
probably most physiologists and brain scientists were materialists of a sort,
at least until quite recently. See
later, Contemporary Mind-Brain Debate.
This is/was at a time when materialism in any crude form has had its day
in fundamental physics. It is now
recognized that the 'material' universe is far from a passive, dull place. Whether it is yet rich enough to make sense
of what human beings and other higher animals are about, is another question.
3.
Aristotelian and Thomistic Hylomorphism: Body is to Soul as Matter (HYLE)
is to Form (MORPHE). Aristotle, Thomas
Aquinas, modern Thomists.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle
starts off with a conception of matter as full of unrealized potentiality. In itself it is neither this nor that. What matter in a certain situation is capable
of doing or being is a function of its form, structure, organization, in Greek
eidos, or morphe, in Latin forma. It is
‘form’ which brings out or ‘actualizes’
this potentiality in one direction rather than another. It is 'form', then, rather than matter, which
makes a material substance to be what it is, e.g. a human being or a dog,
rather than a cat or a mouse or a tree or a stone, even though they are all
made out of the same basic stuff.
[Consider the stupidity of people who say we are only really worth about
$14, this being the value of the crude chemicals in our body. The only problem is, it has taken a 5 billion
year 'research project' to realize the potentiality of these chemicals in the
form of a human being. And to know about
these chemicals is to know almost nothing -- it probably wouldn't be enough to
differentiate a human being from a dog or even a pile of chemicals in the
backyard.]
Psyche
or Anima or Soul, for an Aristotelian, is the name given to form (forma,
morphe) in the case of living things - all living things, not only human
beings. In most of the animal kingdom,
forma or anima consists in a certain way of actualizing the potential of a bit
of matter, and nothing more, such that when that particular actualization
breaks down the animal soul by definition ceases to exist. Psyche or anima, then, is most of the time
just a fact about the matter, though a very important fact indeed in so far as
it is only because it is 'formed' that way that matter has such powers and it
is form we need to talk about if we want to explain anything much --matter by
itself explains hardly anything. Indeed
it is not all that clear whether Aristotle himself believed any more than this
even about human beings, nor whether he believed in the immortality of the
individual human soul. Aristotle allows
that certain capacities which we appear to have, e.g. some of our intellectual
powers, especially what he calls nous poetikos (active or creative
intelligence, poetikos the word from which we get 'poetry') would seem to be
beyond the capacity of mere matter no matter how structured or organized. But his writings are ambiguous as to whether
this power belongs to us as individuals or whether we get it by all
participating, while in a certain state of consciousness, somehow in some kind
of super-mind. This latter would explain
how come we all end up with the same maths and the same science. But it also tends to keep us as individuals
in the status of mere material substances.
Aquinas is not at all
ambiguous: while we are material substances, we are also something more, in so
far as we do things which mere material substances could not do. This gives us some grounds for believing that
something of us will survive. But full
salvation will require the resurrection of the body.
This all makes for a much
more unitary conception of a human being.
The human being is an intelligent, living, perceiving, laughing, crying
body, one unitary substance, not a soul in a body. Soul and body are not two substances but
related to each other as form to matter. They are answers to two different
questions about the same one reality: it is soul which make a something human
rather than a dog or a cat, it is matter which makes it into a body,
distinguished from other bodies, including other human beings even identical
twins, taking up this bit of space rather than some other bit. The human person
is not the soul but the 'composite' of soul and body, and the human person even
in its intellectual functions, e.g. knowledge, relies on the body. Indeed, going the other way, the body without
the soul is not a human body, just a heap of different material substances,
lacking any unity or any unified activity of its own, which is why it soon
decomposes after death.
It also makes much better
sense of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. For dualists, it is very difficult to know
why we would want to get a body back anyway.
It also fits better the background in the Scriptures to the doctrine of
and hope for the resurrection: a much more unitary conception of the human
being.
Dualism,
fear of the body and emphasis on immortality of (and saving your) soul is Greek
rather than Hebrew in origin. Soul in
Scripture is similar in usage to the word 'heart', = your innermost self, your
deepest point, the real inner you, as in rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham,
or love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your
strength and all your mind. It does not,
or need not, refer to another kind of thing, which happens to be imprisoned in
a body. Dualists may point out however
that some kind of immortality of the soul is needed in order to maintain the
identity of a person between death and the last day, something to provide some
continuity between this life and the next.
St Thomas of course tries to have it both ways, a real but deficient
immortality of the soul, deficiencies made up for on the last day with the
resurrection of the body, at which stage only can we talk of a person being
fully saved. Another way of solving this
objection is that of David Coffey and others: a resurrection of the body
immediately after death.
(B) SOME 20TH
CENTURY VIEWS:
1.
Merleau-Ponty: Human beings as Body-Subjects:
The
most determined attempt this century to transcend Cartesian dualism on the one
hand and materialism on the other, and indeed the whole Cartesian way of posing
the problem has probably been that of the French existential Phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908-1961.
·
Dualism: the view of the
human being as a composite of body and spirit, a mind in a body, a ghost in a
machine (Gilbert Ryle, another important player in 20th century
philosophical debates on minds and bodies).
If we start with dualism and then try to overcome it by making one or
the other factor primary, we either reduce mind to body (= materialism) or
identify the real person with the incorporeal soul or spirit. But the problem is misconceived. First we get the body wrong and then we have
to invent something else called a spirit or soul.
·
I/we am not a mind plus a
body or a mind in a body. I am a human
body, one reality with different aspects, at the same time material and
spiritual, a human body, perceiving and perceived, seeing and seen, touching
and touched, pleasing and pleased, hurting and hurt.
·
We can of course consider the
body purely objectively, like a surgeon perhaps does while in the operating
theatre and then we naturally distinguish between the body as object and the
subject. But this is a distinction
within the one reality, an abstraction, a looking for certain purposes at one
side of the reality. "...the objective body is not the truth of the
phenomenal body, the truth, that is to say, of the body as we live it. It is only an impoverished image thereof, and
the problem of the relations between soul and body do not concern the objective
body, which has only a conceptual existence, but the phenomenal body."
(Copleston, pp. 200f.) The human body,
considered as a purely physical object distinct from the subject is an
abstraction, a mental invention, legitimate enough for a variety of purposes
but not an expression of the body as lived or experienced, whether my own body
or that of another. The latter is the
body subject. Indeed, in practice it is
amazing how rarely we do treat human bodies as just physical or chemical
objects or biological objects. Even
doctors do this only to a limited extent - though when they are doing surgery
they absolutely need to. A surgeon can't
normally operate on his/her own wife/husband because they can't make the
requisite abstraction. Most of the time
human bodies as immediately experienced from early childhood onwards are things
which have smiles, hurt, feel pain, express all kinds of emotions. This is a fact, confirmed by hourly
experience. We ought not to be
bamboozled by the scientific abstractions into denying our daily experience.
·
This notion of the
body-subject, among other things, makes for a very straightforward solution to
the problem of other minds. The subject
is not a ghost hidden away behind the body, his or her existence requiring to
be inferred by analogy with my own body.
The subject is the body itself, the body-subject, of which the physical
body is an abstraction, in the case of other people also. It is something I see when I open my eyes,
touch when I reach out my hands. The
small child does not infer the existence of its mother from the smile
which it sees on her face or from the movements of her hands. It has a pre-reflective perception of its
mother in the dialogue of their behaviours.
One recognizes the behaviour of other people as behaviour and understand
it before I learn to correlate my bodily movements with my thought and
intentions. There is no argument
involved. The notion of human behaviour
is operative here: I immediately interpret the acts of another human being not
as movements of matter in space and time but as 'behaviour', and this immediately
and directly, not by way of analogy.
Later on I can decide to treat what is in fact immediately experienced
as behaviour as just movements of matter in space and time, e.g. in using this
as an example in a physics class. But
deciding to treat something as such and such for certain purposes doesn't make
it so or stop it being the other.
"No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living body in the process of
acting, than the objects surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of
significance: they are no longer simply what I could make of them, they are
what this other pattern of behaviour is about to make of them." This is the case even when I don't understand
the behaviour: I immediately want to know what the significance of it is, why
s/he is behaving like that. The main
problem with behaviourism in psychology is not that it ignores the reality of
the mind or consciousness but that it starts off with a faulty concept of
'behaviour'. Our own everyday concept,
as in 'be on your best behaviour' is a much closer rendition of our actual
experience. In behaviour properly
understood we are dealing already with a body subject, not just a physical
body.
For
a fairly straightforward introduction to Merleau-Ponty, see Copleston, A
History of Philosophy, Vol. 9, Part II, pp. 193-208 (= pp. 397-412 in
hardcover library edition of Volume 9).
See also James Foley, "Merleau-Ponty - Body-Soul", in Humanity
and the After Life, edited Moses and Ormerod, pp. 120-131.
2.
PROCESS THINKING on minds and bodies:
For
Process-Relational Thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne,
John Cobb and David Griffin, there is no great problem in conceiving of the
relationship between mind and body.
Everything in the universe has the same basic nature. Everything is a process of more or less
creatively taking account of its total past environment and a giving of itself
to be taken into account by the future of that same environment. In less anthropomorphic language, everything
is reception, transformation and transmission of energy and information from
the total past environment to the future of that environment. But, as the universe evolves, there is a
progressive development towards more and more subtle and complex kinds of environmental
order, capable of supporting the existence of higher and higher grade series of
events, and eventually of those kinds of series of events we call animal and
human minds.
We
(as minds) then are an ordinary natural kind of series of events, of higher
grade than sub-atomic events or atomic events or molecular events or cellular
events or brain events. The higher the
grade event, the more the capacity for taking into account the environment and
responding to it in a creative fashion.
The quality and effective extent of the reception, the degree of
creativity or self-initiative in the transformation and the likely
effectiveness of the transmission all tend to increase as you go up the
ladder. Conversely, what kinds of events
are possible is a function of the richness of the sustaining environment. In order to give rise to mental life as we
know it at this stage in evolution, there is required a functioning brain in a
body in a society of language users at very least.
Whether
this series of 'mental events' could sustain itself, once brought into
existence in the natural course of events, outside a human or other higher
animal organism is a difficult question, on which process thinkers themselves
are in serious disagreement. Whitehead
is non-committal. Hartshorne is strongly
against, for a variety of reasons, including serious religious and ethical
reasons. He thinks of it as a kind of
selfishness, as well as being unlikely.
David Griffin argues fairly strongly in favour of the possibility:
process-relational thinking does not rule it out, and there is some empirical
evidence in favour. We will read some
of
Lately,
Whiteheadian inspired people have been doing their best to play a constructive
role in contemporary mind-brain debates, sometimes in alliance with the
attempts to put Quantum Theory to good use.
See Folder 3 (in library, periodicals section) from recent
(C)The contemporary MIND-BRAIN DEBATE: the options
See attached overheads. This may give you some idea of the rather
complicated and by no means resolved contemporary state of play.
One
of the difficulties about the way the problem is typically posed nowadays in
terms of Mind and Brain (rather than Mind and Body) is that in spite of the
change of emphasis or even perhaps because of it, the problem is for most
people still conceived in the manner of Descartes, relating consciousness on
the one hand with what is assumed to be a bit of complicated machinery on the
other. In fact it may be even more
poorly posed, in so far as it separates not only Mind but also Brain from the
socialized, language using human being - a critique pushed strongly nowadays by
some followers of the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein, e.g. a bloke by the
name of Dilman. We really have been bamboozled
by the scientific treatment of the human body, preferring this to our daily
experience, rather than taking the former as a modelling of certain features
only of the body as we experience it.
But perhaps in this scientistic age this is inevitable, and the likes of
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are fighting a losing battle.
FURTHER
Thomas Nagel, What does it all mean?
John Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity,
F.
Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. 9, Part II, pp. 193-208.
Bibliography
on contemporary mind-brain debate is attached.
There is a
wealth of recently acquired material now in the Banyo library.
MINDS, SOULS AND BODIES
TRADITIONAL POSITIONS
1.
DUALISM: we are
really two things, not just one, interacting with each other, one named SOUL or
MIND, the other named THE BODY
- two things, two different kinds of things.
main
argument for dualism: we do things beyond the
capacity of mere matter, no matter how complicated.
different
ways of modelling the relationship: pilot in a
ship, soul in a prison...
TWO
DIFFERENT FORMS OF DUALISM:
(a) Platonic Dualism:
soul as principle of life, mind as its highest part or expression.
(b) Cartesian Dualism: soul or mind = a thing which
thinks, 'sum res cogitans' versus body which is 'res extensa', a bit of
machinery, as are all animals according to Descartes.
MAIN REASON FOR DUALISM: the way we experience
ourselves, coupled with a fairly low conception of matter.
PROBLEMS
WITH DUALISM:
1)
EXPLAINING THE INTERACTION
2)
HOW DID ‘MIND’ GET INTO THE UNIVERSE?
Platonic
Dualism
Soul
= principle of
of
life
Soul = principle of life, a kind of reality in
its own right, responsible for the dynamism and order in things, with a
different relation to space than matter (spirit is where it acts or is acted
upon)
Body = matter, which requires soul if it is to
be at all dynamic or ordered
Cartesian
Dualism
Soul
=
A
thing
Which
Thinks
They (somehow)
Interact causally
Body
=
A
thing
Which
Takes
up
Space,
=
a bit of machinery
Soul
has no relationship at all to space: it doesn't make sense to ask what shape
your thought about next year is.
2. MATERIALISM: in spite of having a low
conception of matter, one can be brave and just deny there is anything else.
Various forms, ranging from ancient atomism to
contemporary reductionist identity theories.
MAIN ATTRACTION OF MATERIALISM: makes everything scientifically
explicable, including human beings in their entirety.
3. Aristotelian and Thomistic HYLOMORPHISM: BODY IS TO SOUL AS MATTER (HYLE)
IS TO FORM (MORPHE)
Aristotle: Matter as full of unrealized potentiality. What it gives rise to depends on how it is
formed.
Higher mental functions still present a problem,
which he appears not sure how to solve.
Thomas: Soul as an incomplete substance which determines that a bit of matter
should have this particular form.
'Incomplete' in so far as it relies on the realized potentiality of
matter in the body which it brings about in order to do its thing - even in
knowing and loving.
On the other side, body without its soul is not a
human body, just a collection of different material substances.
This makes
better sense of the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, and of the Hebrew more unitary conception of the human being
Hylomorphism
Soul :: Body as Form:: Matter
Soul brings out the potential of matter in one direction rather
than another, makes it a human being rather than a dog or a cat or a pile of
dust. It is the fundamental organizing
principle of the thing, the foundation for its characteristic activities
(including mental).
(Similar diagram for Merleau-Ponty, though the detail is very
different.)
MINDS, SOULS AND BODIES (CONT.)
SOME 20TH CENTURY POSITIONS:
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908 -1961): HUMAN BEINGS AS BODY-SUBJECTS
-
we start with a faulty conception of the human body as the 'objective body';
-
but this latter is an abstraction, not the body as we live it or as it is
immediately experienced.
-
the body as lived or experienced is already subject, person. This is a fact, confirmed by hourly
experienced. We ought not to be
bamboozled by the scientific abstractions into denying our daily experience.
-
this solves all kinds of otherwise insoluble problems, and gives us a much more
adequate notion of 'behaviour'.
PROCESS
THINKING ON MINDS
AND BODIES: Whitehead, Hartshorne, John Cobb, David
Griffin.
-
everything is a creative taking into account of its total past environment and
a giving of itself to be taken into account by the future of that environment.
-
this happens at various levels, with higher levels situated in and sustained by
and being drawn on by lower levels.
-
we as minds are an ordinary natural kind of series of events, of higher grade
than sub-atomic or atomic or molecular or cellular or brain events.
THE
CONTEMPORARY MIND-BRAIN DEBATE: OUTLINE OF POSITIONS:
1) DUALIST INTERACTIONISM: John Eccles and Karl
Popper.
2) NON-DUALIST ANTI-REDUCTIONIST THEORIES: various varieties:
(A)
EMERGENTIST MONISM - esp. Roger Sperry, 'mentalist monism'
- matter
at a certain level of complexity gives rise to mind, which then interacts with
it.
(B) PROCESS-RELATIONAL
AND OTHER MULTI-LEVEL ONTOLOGIES
– mental events as high grade natural events
taking place in certain rich environments, nothing particularly special
(C)
DUAL-ASPECT or soft IDENTITY THEORIES (esp. J. Searle and D.M. MacKay, with a
background in Spinoza)
-
consciousness as identical with certain brain events, as lived through from
within versus as seen from without.
(D)
‘SUPERVENIENCE’ IDENTITY THEORIES (sometimes the same as with C or A above):
Mind or mentality or ‘mental’ events and processes
‘supervene’
on physical events and processes, in much the same way as the liquidity of water supervenes at the
macro level on the molecules of water. [‘Supervenes’, like ‘emergence’,
however, tends often to be a word to cover a gap, a question rather than an
answer.]
(E)
EPIPHENOMENALISM
- there is
consciousness, mental events, but it is no more than an epi-phenomenon, of no
causal influence or evolutionary significance.
3) MATERIALIST REDUCTIONISM/HARD IDENTITY THEORIES: there are no mental events as such, no such thing as 'consciousness'
(because we can't (yet) understand it
scientifically, therefore it doesn't exist - a left-over from primitive modes
of thinking which they hope we will grow out of one day.)
4) FUNCTIONALISM: mentality
as a particular kind of functioning; in what hardware this is realized is
irrelevant. Mentality related to
physical reality = software to hardware.
5) TO RECOGNIZE THE LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC THINKING : science can't make sense of it but science isn't everything. Perhaps we will never be able to understand
human consciousness: there is no reason why a middle-range primate which has
managed to come down from the trees should be able to fully understand the
mysteries of the universe.
(This is susceptible to more than one possibility,
depending on whether the person in question equates understanding with
scientific understanding.)
Mind-Brain Identity Theory
(cf. Spinoza)
Mind: experienced
directly
And immediately, 'from inside'
They are in fact the same
thing,
Looked
at from two different
Angles.
Brain:
Experienced indirectly, through sense perception and scientific
instruments
Recent
Additions to the Library (Dewey decimal 126 and 128.2 mostly)
The following collections:
The
Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate. Edited by Richard Warner
and Tadensz. Blackwell, Oxford
The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Edited
by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and Guven Guzeldere. MIT Press,
Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem. Edited
by Jonathan Shear. MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1995-7.
Plus the
following:
Roger Penrose
et al. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. CUP, 1997.
John R.
Searle. The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta
Books,
John R.
Searle. The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT
Press,
Owen
Flanagan. Consciousness Reconsidered. MIT Press,
For (much,
much) more, see David Chalmers’ Home Page, at www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/ .
Video: “Is
Mind Distinct from Body?” The Examined
Life, 3. In library: SP 128.2
E24, I.