physicalism

What is physicalism

• physicalism is the view that everything is ultimately physical and if correct, disproves dualisms claims that the mind is not an ontologically distinct substance from the physical and nor is it a non-physical property

  • instead insists on a relationship of ‘supervenience’ between mental and physical - mental properties depend upon physical properties and the way the world is physically determines the nature of mental states -> physicalist task is defining consciousness is physical terms

What is behaviourism

• Behaviourism is the view that a full conceptual analysis of mental state concepts (beliefs, sensations) can be shown as identical in meaning to behavioural concepts - mental properties can be analytically reduced to those of the physical e.g. the mental state ‘hungry’ can be understood as ‘eat’

  • analytic reduction is where talk in one area is shown to be equivalent in meaning to talk in the other e.g. mother vs female parent

Advantages of philosophical behaviourism

• resolves the dualist problem of interaction - as behaviourism denies that the mind is a distinct substance from the rest of the body, the issue of how the two can interact dissolves. Behaviourism claims that analysis of our discussion of mental states reveals that it concerns observable behaviour and not an unobservable, immaterial substance in causal interaction with the body

• logical positivist approach - meaningful propositions are to do with what can enter our experience and so reject as confused the idea that other minds could be isolated from any possibility of detection -> talk of things that cannot be verified is meaningless and the failure to recognise this allows dualists to fall into problem of other minds - behaviourism eliminates this problem

  • we are capable of removing the problem of other minds as we can see that others have mental properties through their behaviour, and we can also meaningfully talk about other minds as we can verify their mental state through empirically observing their behaviour (dualism fails as mental states are not tautologous e.g. I am happy, and dualist mental states cannot be verified empirically)

    • issue - verificationism fails by its own lights so meaningless ultimately

• First devised as Hard Behaviourism by Hempel - he took a scientific approach to be able to talk meaningfully about supposedly private mental states -> only behaviour can be publically observable as ideas and will cannot

  • he believed talk about the psychological that is meaningful (or in principle verifiable) can be reduced into statements that only contain the concepts of physics e.g. sad becomes crying, trembling

Explain the multiple realisability and circularity objections for hard behaviourism

• in order to complete his reduction to language of behaviourism, Hempel cannot use expressions that contain human agency (I kicked a ball) as acting with intent references another mental state -> must be language of pure body movement e.g. my foot lifted off the ground and collided with the ball

  • this simplified action is so reductive that many different mental states or specific actions can be reduced to this

• Similarly,  the same action can be reduced into several different ways such as when greeting someone, you may raise a hand, punch the hair, kick a ball etc. 

  • actions are multiply realisable and do not smoothly translate particular actions into purely behavioural descriptions

• Another issue is that one mental state does not necessarily lead to a specific type of action due to other mental states e.g. being thirsty but not drinking the water as it could be poisoned -> a complete analysis must reduce beliefs concerning whether the drink is poisoned to behaviour as well -> the analysis of this belief references mental states since how this belief manifests itself in behaviours depends on other mental states the person has

  • it follows that we cannot complete the analysis without reintroducing mental state terms at every turn - behavioural analysis cannot be completed and the behaviourist’s project fails

Explain the spartan example and Ryle’s solution to it

• issue - spartan example

  • mental states do not always result in observable behaviour e.g. when the spartan feels pain, he represses his urge to exhibit pain behaviour -> can we say he does not feel pain in this case

    • soft behaviourism says he has a disposition to exhibit pain action but has another disposition that takes priority in this case (not react)

• key response to these issues - soft behaviourism

  • Ryle devises an alternative to hard behaviourism that does not insist reduction of language of mind to pure language of physics is possible, but instead claims that analysis of mental terms can reveal dispositions to behave in a certain way e.g. sugar is soluble but may not be currently dissolved - a belief is similarly someone’s tendency to act in a certain way e.g. if she was thirsty, she would drink water

  • mental concepts are therefore not cause and effect but instead ‘inference tickets’ that can help form hypotheses about persons’ likely behaviour based on past behaviour

Summarise the dualist objections to behaviourism

• dualist arg for issue with behaviourism - evidence of introspection

  • dualists will urge that I am aware from my own experience that mental states have a subjective and private dimension -> qualia have a specific quality which I am directly acquainted with -> this subjective quality cannot be defined in terms of behaviour (no behaviour description can account for what it is like to see red)

    • behaviourism can help give mental states to others but it cannot do justice to lived experience of mental life from subjective point of view

• dualist arg for issue with behaviourism - interaction / mental states cause behaviour

  • day to day experience suggests that our mental states have a causal influence on our behaviour e.g. if I want to eat cake, the desire to eat cake is what brings us to eat it

  • but behavioural analysis says the desire is to be analysed by my behaviour and the desire can be reduced to disposition to eat the cake rather than the choice itself

  • behaviourism is at odds with common sense and folk psychology, and though common sense could be wrong, it is able to afford an account for causation which behaviourism cannot do and thus behaviour cannot be explained without circularity -> behaviour can only be explained by other behaviour according to behaviourists

    • it is therefore more reasonable to stick with the common-sense understanding

• dualist arg for issue with behaviourism - asymmetry

  • there is a difference between the way I come to know about my mental states and the way that I come to know those of others - I only have the behaviour of others to decide someone else’s mental state e.g. Paul is in pain from moaning and clutching his jaw

  • however, for me I have no need of behavioural evidence as I am directly acquainted with my mental state

  • behaviourism cannot account for this asymmetry - it claims I arrive at knowledge of my mental states the same way as I arrive at the knowledge of others’

Summarise the other objections to behaviourism

• Issue with behaviourism - super spartan example

  • not that they suppress their pain, they literally are not even disposed to any corresponding observable behaviour  and do not have any dispositions -> behaviourism confuses evidence we ascribe to mental states with the states themselves e.g. before polio was discovered it was identified by its symptoms yet once it was discovered, having the virus was necessary and sufficient to have the disease regardless of symptoms -> pain is not just pain behaviour but pains are the cause of pain behaviour 

• issue with behaviourism - perfect actor objection 

  • idea that you can pretend to exhibit pain behaviour without being in pain -> actual behaviour cannot be sufficient for the ascription of mental states to people

    • Hempel says a more penetrating examination would give a decisive answer on a physicalistic basis e.g. examine nervous system to see true answer -> what if someone fakes the physiological symptoms too? ‘perfect actor’ who can also simulate physiological condition

      • Hempel says this is incoherent as we can draw a conceptual distinction between physical signs and the mental state though it is unclear what proof there is for this claim

Summarise MBTIT (mind-brain type identity theory)

• theory that states the mind is the brain and that all mental states and processes are identical with brain states and processes

• rather than mental states being able to be analytically reduced to brain states, MBTIT posits that they are ontologically reducible

  • identity theorist does not aim to say the talk of the mind means the talk of the brain (as they do not e.g. experiencing a sensation or holding a belief is not the same as certain neurons firing in my brain) -> they are not a priori proved to be synonymous through the analysis of talk of minds, but in fact the identity theorist aims to show that as a matter of empirical fact, talk of the mind and the brain both refer to the same object

  • identity theorists believe that in the future as our neuroscientific understanding develops, we will be able to prove this -> it is a contingent identity dependent on how the world happens to be rather than an a priori theory

• MBTIT focuses on types and tokens - types are a general class and a token is a particular within that class e.g. clothes are a class and different types of clothing are tokens

  • mind-brain type identity theory seeks to show that each type of mental state is identical to a type of brain state

What are the advantages of MBTIT

• science has been successful in demonstrating that mysterious aspects of reality can be given physicalist explanations e.g. rainbows as the separation of different wavelengths of light or life in terms of replicating strands of DNA -> these give us hope to believe that sensations, beliefs and desires will be explicable in similar ways in the future and this is shown to be increasingly evident by the evidence of real-time imaging techniques used on subjects performing specific mental activities such as recalling events in the past are correlated with specific parts of the brain being active; this is what an identity theorist expects to see

• the theory of evolution encourages us to regard all features of human beings as the consequence of a physical, material process -> consciousness would have to have gradually emerged as our brains became increasingly complex and there is no place within the physical evolutionary account for origins of an appearance of a non-physical mind

• physicalist theories should be preferred on grounds of simplicity as everything in our world is explicable in terms of physics and having immaterial mental properties and states of consciousness that cannot be accommodated with physicalist theory would render them ‘nomological danglers’ which do not fit with the system of laws that govern everything else in the universe -> offends ockham’s razor (if two hypotheses’ explanatory power is equal, the simpler one should be preferred)

• avoids the problem of interaction - decisions can cause actions and actions can cause mental sensations as in MBTIT, the mental is the physical

  • also problem of other minds - we can confirm the existence of other minds by ensuring that others’ brains are operating in the right way medically so that they must be minded (mind is brain)

identity theory preferable to behaviourism as it affords a causal role for mental states -> behaviour is caused in identity theory (mental states are ontologically reducible to brain states) and can be explained by mental states and processes WHEREAS for behaviourism, mental states ARE behaviour and so only behaviour can cause other behaviour

What are the dualist arguments against MBTIT

1. identity theory is contradicted by appeals to evidence of introspection -> I am aware that mental states have a subjective and private dimension e.g. qualia which have a specific quality I am acquainted with -> there isn’t a physical state that corresponds to this -> identity theory cannot do justice for subjective experience 

2. also, conceivability or indivisibility args outline the essential differences between physical / mental states (weak?)

3. spatial location problem - Leibniz Law means that if we can find a property of mind that brain does not possess (or vice versa), we demonstrate the two are not equivalent -> since brain states have a spatial location, specific size and shape, mental states must have the same specific location, size and shape -> is nonsensical to say my mental state that I am thirsty is x centimetres away from my mental state that rabbits have long ears -> mental states do not have size or shape

   1. response - ordinary language lags behind neuroscientific advances we are now making hence why it sounds weak - once our understanding of the brain has developed sufficiently, and we are well-versed in its terminology, we will no longer find it odd to discuss mental states in such a way -> also not all physical states have sizes and shapes either e.g. being wet - it is not square for example -> these are instead conditions of physical beings which are contained within the body of the physical being, just as the mental state that I think my dog is wise is within my body wherever I am

4. irreducibility of intentionality - intentionality is a property of certain mental states which makes them represent or point towards matters which lie beyond them e.g. believing that something or hoping for something -> physical systems are unable to account for such a property as physical things are defined by the material itself and never something external or separate

response - brain states can be about a feature of the world if they are caused in the right way by that feature e.g. If my brain is in a particular state because of the Moon (moon has impacted my sense organs and so it has causally been involved in producing the brain state), that brain state might be about the moon

Explain the objection that talk to the brain is not talk of the mind

• Putnam says words we use to talk about mental states do not mean the same as our vocabulary used for physical states -> If I say a certain neural pathway is being activated instead of ‘I have a headache’, isn’t something lost in translation? (my own feelings and sensations)

• response - differentiate between ‘meaning’ (the way the thing it identifies is presented to the mind / how it is conceived) and ‘reference’ (the actual thing in the world being referred to) -> two things with different meanings can refer to the same thing in the world e.g. the ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Evening Star’ have different meanings but have the same reference (Venus) -> having a certain neural pathway activated is not analytically the same as having a headache. However, we are not saying that one means another, we are saying they empirically / contingently refer to each other hence the ontological (as opposed to analytic) reduction

Explain the multiple realisability objection to MBTIT

• identity theory implies that it is not possible for the same type of mental state to be realised by a different type of brain state in different individuals or in the same individual at different times - if we both share belief that it is raining, we must both have the same type of neurophysiological process going on -> if this brain state is destroyed, the implication would be that it would be impossible to have that brain state again though empirical evidence shows this is not how the brain works (we can recover from brain damage and re-form the same type of belief, so we must be using a different part of the brain to do so -> plasticity of brain suggests that types of mental state can be realised in different types of brain state

Explain chauvinism objection to MBTIT

• if pain were identical with a brain process in humans, this would imply that other animals do not experience pain as they have a different type of brain - this is implausible and thus we must be able to explain the nature of pain in different types of brain and pain cannot be a particular type of neurophysiological activity

• also works for beliefs - if an alien with a very different brain shared the same belief as us, it would be chauvinistic to claim it has a different type of brain and this prevents it from having the same type of mental state -> in such a situation we would be persuaded that the alien did hold beliefs even though it doesn’t have our type of brain -> types of mental state cannot be identical with types of brain state as there are different types of brain state they can be realised in 

Summarise Eliminative materialism

• EM is sceptical about the chances of the neuroscience of the future being able to account for all our folk-psychological concepts in the brain

  • believes there will be no ‘smooth reduction’ from mental to physical though not because mind is non-physical but because at least some mental states do not exist as they are understood

• EM rejects the identity theorist’s claim that mental states can be ontologically reduced to neurophysiology - this is on the basis that mental states are built upon folk psychology which is ultimately false and are instead the result of outdated science’s attempts to explain the mental which can be done better with developments in neuroscience

  • Churchland uses the analogy of a basketball player’s demands for attention in terms of his possession of a ‘big ego’ - this concept has no genuine neurophysiological and so ‘egos’ will not figure in the neuroscience of the future and will be eliminated

• folk psychology can be seen in the same way as preconceptions about heat - it used to be believed that heat was propagated by a fluid called caloric, but this was replaced with molecular theory and the explanation of the agitation of molecules

  • THIS IS NOT A REDUCTION - it is an elimination

Advantages of Eliminative materialism

• folk psychology fails to explain much of how we function e.g. how we learn things, how memory works or what happiness is -> even concepts used in modern psychiatry, which are grounded in folk psychology, are inadequate as an account of what goes on in mental illness -> talk of paranoid delusions and stress will dissipate in time just as reference to people being possessed by devils

• folk psychology has stagnated whereas successful scientific theories should constantly expand and develop -> no meaningful developments since the time of the ancient greeks and will be eclipsed by folk psychology

• folk theories are inaccurate in general and do not survive once science develops in that specific area such as caloric theory or diseases spreading due to ‘bad air’ rather than germ theory

Explain certainty of mental states objection

• I am directly aware of the existence of desires, thoughts and pains -> theories that deny their existence must be false? It is absurd to deny the existence of what one is directly aware of

  • response - believer in caloric could not doubt its existence as they directly perceived it -> they assume that an observation of a phenomenon can occur independently of a conceptual framework -> we might be in thrall to our folk-psychological concepts when we think we are directly aware of our mental states -> OVERALL THIS RESPONSE IS SOMEWHAT CIRCULAR? BEGGING QUESTION

Explain the good explanatory power of folk psychology objection

• folk psych does have a substantial amount of explanatory power and predictive success - it is first and foremost a theory of human behaviour used to predict our actions and can explain a large proportion of what we observe in our own and others’ behaviour in many circumstances

• can be seen as successful due to its implementation as a key theory for over 5000 years - universal across human cultures and has helped us develop up to this point

• psychology continues to incorporate many key concepts into it - shows it is not necessarily stagnating as folk psych concepts are used to treat mental health illnesses for example with cognitive behavioural therapy which outperforms drugs and neurological approaches whilst still being tied to concepts like thoughts and feelings and sensations 

• since we do not have a neuroscientific approach right now, folk psych is still the best we have (abductive)

  • response - this doesn’t show its correct or the best account -> many of these things are simply mislabelled concepts and as soon as science develops, folk psychology will be proven invalid clearly - weak

Explain the objection that EM as a theory is self-refuting

• if EM is true, then beliefs do not exist -> if beliefs do not exist, the belief that EM is true cannot exist and thus the language used to articulate the theory does not express anything genuine - it is meaningless -> impossible to believe EM -> therefore self-refuting

  • response - in debate between vitalist (who believes in the existence of a substance called ‘vital spirit’ that gives things life) and an anti-vitalist, it could be argued that “anti-vitalist claims vital spirit doesn’t exist -> if vital spirit doesn’t exist, anti-vitalist isn’t alive -> if they aren’t alive, the words they use to express their view is meaningless -> according to the anti-vitalist it is impossible to hold the claim and so it is self-refuting” 

    • this analogy is weak however - EM directly denies the very category of belief in which the theory is articulated whereas the vitalist does not -  if beliefs do not exist, then eliminativism and the arguments for it cannot be coherently articulated and the only way to make sense of the EM proponent’s arguments is by presupposing truth of folk psych

Summarise functionalism

• Functionalism identifies mental states with functional roles - this means what the thing does or the role it has in causal interplay with other things

  • organs are best defined functionally e.g. heart pumps blood around body

  • to define a mental state functionally is to define it in terms of the causal role it plays alongside environmental  inputs via senses and outputs via behaviour - being a particular mental state is just whatever it is that plays  a specific causal role of this sort

    • e.g. pain is a state caused by damage to the body which causes other states such as anxiety / desire to get rid of pain and produces pain behaviour (groans)

What are the advantages of functionalism

• it accounts for the causal role of mental states in our behaviour which behaviourism cannot -> functionalism aligns with our common sense view that mental states cause our behaviour and gives mental states an explanatory role in understanding behaviour -> we act as we do as mental states cause us to act

  • also gets past issues like circularity objection - functionalism embraces fact that a particular mental state cannot be defined independently of its causal relationship to other mental states 

• functionalism also has advantages over identity theory - functionalism argues different types of beings can be minded as long as their brains are functionally equivalent to ours - no chauvinism objection as all things can experience pain / hold beliefs if their brains instantiate the relevant functional states

explain the objection to functionalism of the functional duplicate with inverted qualia

• suppose you had a clone who reacts to the EM spectrum that we perceive in the same way - according to functionalism, we must have the same mental states when we experience colours since mental states are defined functionally

• it is conceivable also that we have systematically inverted qualitative experiences of colour e.g. when you experience quale of red, I experience quale of green

• qualia are intrinsic in nature, a quality which is independent of the relations qualia hold to other mental states -> if qualia are defined as such, they must escape a functionalist reduction since functionalism defines mental states extrinsically (in relation to other mental states and behaviour) or universally

  • response - functionalists could disagree that qualia are intrinsic - if they are part of folk psych, maybe this definition is outdated and in a more theoretical understanding of the mind we will understand them differently so that it will be inconceivable to be in a functionally identical state while enjoying different qualia -> say qualia were inversed, what I call red and what you call red would have the same system of interconnections with other colours and also other internal states in a complex network e.g. the colour blood would still excite while the colour of the sky would calm -> the more we factor the complex ways that colour experiences interconnect, the less plausible it seems to hold onto this notion that they can be defined intrinsically

explain the objection to functionalism of mary’s room can be applied to functional facts

• if mary knows all the functional facts of colour vision before seeing colour AND she still learns something new when experiencing colour for the first time, there is therefore more to know about colour vision than what is given in a full functional account of seeing it -> functionalism false

  • response - qualia may appear subjectively to have an intrinsic nature which escapes a functional reduction, but this may just be the consequence of us not having an advanced understanding of the detailed functional facts which ultimately constitute such mental states - we cannot know all these details precisely because we need to be apprised of our functional states in an efficient way and awareness of colour os a kind of shortcut awareness of a complex mental state -> so if Mary did really know all these facts, she would be able to predict what it would be like for her to experience colour vision herself

explain the objection to functionalism of a possible duplicate with no qualia

• 1st version - Ned Block says imagine a duplicate of you with a hollowed out skull replaced by a homunculi-head (head of little people) - it would still be minded according to the functionalist account for mentality and would include experiences of pain and colours as well as intentional states like beliefs and desires -> Block argues that we have a strong intuition that such a system would not be minded, as there is nothing it is like to be the homunculi head

• similarly, Block proposes the China Brain experiment where instead the billion citizens of China are engaged in realising the same machine table with radios connecting them with each other / the body -> if the body stepped on a nail, we must imagine the people of china would successfully cause the body to exhibit the pain response of yelping, hopping on one leg and attempting to remove the nail 

  • but would anyone feel pain? if not, the system can be a state which is functionally equivalent to feeling pain in you whilst not being in pain at the same time -> functionalism is therefore too liberal and not an adequate account of mentality

• response - why wouldn’t these experience qualia? if system were complex enough to succeed in replicating complex human behaviour, maybe they would be able to also realise conscious mental states and experience these -> unless we are substance dualists, we must acknowledge that qualia do just emerge from the complex arrangement and actions of neurons in the brain despite how strange it seems