What do we mean by "The Mind"

the mind

“thinking thing” “centre of consciousness”

there are “mental states/processes/events/properties” that your mind has/does

brain theory

claims what makes you you is the brain. wherever your brain goes, you go.

body theory

claims what makes you you is the physical body. it doesn’t matter what’s happening in your life - if your body stops working, you die.

intentionality

mental states, such as beliefs, desires, thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc., point beyond themselves; they are about something else. this is consistent for all our mental states. the mental is characterised by this feature of “aboutness” - a feature to which philosophers refer by the term “intentionality”. “intentional states” are states that have intentionality/aboutness.

problems with intentionality

physical states are not about anything, they don’t have intentionality. however, physical things gain intentionality, for example, poetry.

response to problems with intentionality

all mental states are about something (including emotions) but we might not always recognise what they are about. physical things only have intentionality when given it by mental states. writing on a page would mean nothing without mental states, nor would statues or flags.

qualia

phenomenological aspects of conscious experience. the “what it is like to be” in a certain conscious state. what it feels like, “from the inside”, or the point of view of the person having the mental state. they are subjective, non-intentional and intrinsic to mental states. all or at least some mental states have phenomenal properties - some but not all philosophers use the term qualia to refer to these properties, where qualia are defined as “intrinsic and non-intentional phenomenal properties which are introspectively accessible”. beyond this, it is hard to see what we could say to explain what it is like. we can’t draw it out of our minds and bring it into public view. it is as though you have to have experienced the quale (singular of “qualia”) to know what it is like. Philosophers who are interested in qualia normally suppose them to be also non-intentional. my experience of red isn’t about anything: it just is what it is. it has no propositional content and doesn’t point beyond itself to the world.

The Conscious Mind

According to Descartes, the conscious mind is often thought to be what constitutes my personal identity; it is the essence of what I am. Today, it is generally accepted that there are mental processes that occur of which we are not consciously aware . In Chalmer’s The Conscious Mind, he discusses the reasons we have for believing in unconscious mental states and processes and briefly traces the history of this idea, beginning with Freud. What Freud recognised is that we can explain certain behaviours by reference to mental states, such as desires, of which the person need not be aware. More recent research in neuroscience showing the existence of unconscious mental states is discussed using the example of language processing which goes on as we speak but of which we are unaware: in conversation, you produce complex grammatically accurate sentences but while you are aware of what you want to say (the meaning of your speech) you are not aware of how you selected the words and phrases, or of the way you applied grammatical rules in the construction of sentences. it seems a good proportion of our cognitive processes happens beneath the surface, as it were, of conscious awareness.

David Chalmer’s The Conscious Mind

Chalmers poses the question “do physical processes give rise to experience? Why do not these processes take place in the dark, without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness?” Chalmers calls this “mystery” the “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem may also be expressed by pointing out that there seems to be an “explanatory gap” between understanding the nature of brain processes, which may believe underlie conscious experience, and the nature of that experience itself. For example, we may know what happens physiologically when someone experiences pain, that is, we may be able to point to certain neurons firing in the brain. But this doesn’t seem to answer the question of why pain feels the way it does: it doesn’t explain the quale. We can understand the brain’s processes without this appearing to give us any explanation of how these give rise to certain sorts of experience. Because of this explanatory gap, some philosophers deny that the mind is produced by the physical at all, arguing that it is a special spiritual thing, different in king from our physical self, but somehow attached to it.

distinction between mental and physical states