Discussion Board Forum 1

S1:

Hello, and welcome to another presentation for Philosophy 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. I’m Dr. Mark Foreman. In our last presentation, we introduced the mind-body problem. This problem of how does this mind, which is immaterial, causally relate to the body which is material. How could it cause material things to happen when it can’t come into contact with them? That’s the basic problem we were looking at. In this presentation, I want to look at some proposed solutions to that problem that have been suggested throughout the history of philosophy. As I do so, I want to remind you of some important distinctions.

First of all, we need to make sure we understand the distinction between the mind and the brain. The mind is a non-physical thing that has thoughts and ideas as its properties; it has mental properties called thoughts and ideas. The brain is a physical substance that has physical properties. It has shape, it has size, has weight, it can be physically observed. We can look inside your skull and see the brain. The mind doesn’t have physical properties; it doesn’t have any physical properties at all. I want to keep those two distinct for now, although we’re going to see down the road that some people are going to try to bring them together and say that there’s only one substance, the brain, and that there is no such real thing as the mind apart from the brain. But for now we’re going to keep them distinct, as mind and brain.

Another distinction I want to make sure we understand is the distinction between a mental state and what we might call a physical state or a brain state. A mental state is simply an idea, a thought that you might have. Maybe it’s a propositional thought like, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Or it might be an emotion that you’re feeling that you have, like fear or wonder or love for something. Or it might be a sensation that you have, like pain for example is a mental sensation. Those are mental states. A physical state or a brain state is simply described in physical terms. Certain synapses firing when the neural junctions of our brain come together. Certain things occurring within our neural system, neural impulses, things like that. Those are physical or brain states. And I want to keep those two distinct as well as we talk about the distinction between the mind and the body. We’re going to continue using our same illustration that we used in our last presentation. And that is, I’m going to use a bold figure to represent the body or the brain, and I’ll use a dotted figure to represent the mind. Let’s look at some of the solutions we have to offer.

S2:

The first proposed solution I want to look at is called interactionism. And I choose it first because, first of all, historically, it’s the earliest idea around out there. It comes from Renee Descartes. He was a French philosopher, and really was the first person to look at the relationship between the mind and the body. And he proposes as a solution, interactionism. Also want to mention it first because I think it’s the one that seems to be the most intuitive for us. Interactionism basically says that the mind and body interact in some way or another. That my brain can causally affect my mind, and my mind can causally affect my body, make my body do things. And that’s basically what they do, there’s just an interaction that goes on. Now, Renee Descartes believed that this interaction took place in the center of the brain, in a small gland there in the center of the brain. That’s where he thought the interaction took place. In his day, they didn’t know exactly what this gland did in the brain, and so they simply assumed, well this must be where the interaction takes place. And so he just simply suggested that the solution of the mind-body problem is that they interact. Well, the strength of this view is of course that it seems to go along with our intuition and our experience. It does seem like there’s a causal relationship between my mind and my body. That my mind causes my body to do things, and my body can have a causal effect upon my mind. That’s a good strength for it. What about a weakness? Well the problem with this view is, while it seems good, it doesn’t really seem to solve the mind-body problem. In fact, it just kind of restates it. If we ask Descartes, how do the mind and body relate together, he says, O, well they interact. And we ask him, Ok, well how do they interact? That’s what we really want to know. Descartes says, Well, they causally relate together. Well the problem is, that’s our original question. We want to know how do they causally relate together. And he can answer simply by saying they interact. It’s an interesting idea. It doesn’t mean interactionism is wrong, but it does mean that it doesn’t give us any sort of explanation. And we’re looking for an explanation for the problem, a solution to the problem, not just simply a restatement of it. So, we’re going to leave interactionism behind for now.

S3:

Our next proposed solution is called parallelism. Now parallelism proposes that the way to solve the problem is to simply acknowledge that for every physical state there exists a corresponding mental state, but there’s no causal relationship between them. You’ll notice in our illustration here, we have our two figures, our bold figure to represent the brain and our dotted figure to represent the mind, but we don’t have the arrows between them like we had with interactionism. There’s no causal relationship between them. This view wants to say, Well there’s a correspondence between them, my physical states and my mental states, but one does not cause the other to happen. For example, if I was to come up to you with a pin, for example, and shove it into your arm, you would have a physical state of a pin going in your arm, but you would also have a mental state of something we call pain. Pain is a mental state, it’s a mental sense that we have. Well, we certainly see there’s a relationship between that: pin going in arm causes pain. But the question we want to ask of course is, how do we account for that? And that’s the problem with this. The strength for this is that of course it gets rid of the causal problem. Well that’s good, we don’t have to worry about the mental causing the physical or the physical causing the mental. But the weakness behind this is, it doesn’t give us any accounting for why there’s any sort of relationship at all. Why is there a correspondence between my mental states and my physical states? Why is it that every time I stick a pin in somebody’s arm, they experience pain? Well this doesn’t tell me why. It just says, there’s a correspondence. That’s nice, but it’s kind of vacuous, it doesn’t really answer the question as well. So, we want to leave parallelism aside as well.

S4:

Our third proposed solution tries to solve the problem by bringing God into the picture. This was proposed by the German philosopher, Leibnitz. Leibnitz basically wanted to argue that physical states have been preordained by God to correspond with the appropriate mental states. Now, note the keys on the backs of our two figures here. There’s a key on the back of our bold figure here and a key on the back of our dotted figure. The idea here is that both our mental states and our physical states from the beginning of our life to the end of our life to act in a certain way and to correspond with each other. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s suppose that these two lines represent the two different aspects of our life. The first line represents all of the physical aspects that occur from the day that we’re born until the day that we die. Everything’s been preordained to occur. The second line represents all the mental states that I would have, from the day that I was born until the day that I die. And all of them have been preordained by God as well. What Leibnitz is proposing here, with his pre-established harmony, is that any particular time that I experience a particular physical state, let’s say a pin going in to my arm, God also supplies at that particular point the appropriate mental state, pain. Now of course there’s a certain amount of genius we have to attribute to Leibnitz. It does certainly seem like he solves all the problems. We don’t have a causal relationship, because these two parallel lines never intersect. So we don’t have physical states causing mental states or mental states causing physical states. That’s good, ok. And he does seem to give us an accounting for why there’s a correspondence between them where the parallelist wasn’t able to give us one: God explains that. God preordained my physical states, he preordained my mental states. And in his infinite wisdom he preordained it in such a way that every time I experience a particular physical state, again, a pin going into my arm, I at the same time experience a particular mental state called pain. Well that’s good. It does seem like, in many ways, Leibnitz solved many of the problems. That’s the strength of this view.

S6:

While the view has its strengths, it also has a very severe weakness, which many of you probably have already thought about or it’s already occurred to you. Because the view has a very strong pre-ordination idea behind it, there’s a problem in that it doesn’t give us any free will. We don’t seem to be able to make any free decisions. Everything that happens to me, both mentally and physically, has been pre-ordained by God, so I have to give up free will. Now maybe Leibnitz would say, well ok, let’s just bite the bullet and we give up free will. We just don’t have free will, it’s an illusion. We think we’re free but we’re really not. In fact, God has pre-ordained that everything that happens, happened. Well that certainly would solve the mind-body problem for us, if Leibnitz is correct here. But it brings up a very serious problem, and that is of course that if there’s no free will, then what do we do about the problem of evil? Do people choose to do evil, or are they pre-ordained to do evil? Well if Leibnitz is correct, everything is pre-ordained, my physical states and my mental states, therefore every time I choose to do something evil or I choose sin, it’s not really my choice. God was the one who pre-ordained I would do that. And that makes God the author of evil. Well that’s a pretty big thing to do. And many people are not willing to take that step to solve the mind-body problem. They just feel that’s too severe a step, to make God the author of evil. So we’re going to leave Leibnitz’ pre-established harmony aside, and see if there’s another solution that might work better.

S7:

Our fourth proposed solution is called occasionalism. And it’s the invention of a philosopher named Malebranche, another French philosopher. Now Malebranche liked Leibnitz’ idea of bringing God into the picture. But he didn’t like the idea of all the pre-ordination, because he saw immediately what that led to, the release of free will and therefore the problem of God being the author of evil. And he didn’t like that idea. He believed that free will events do occur in the world, things people choose to do, totally of their freedom there. And so what he said, he used part of Leibnitz’ solution, ok, but not rid of the free will idea. But he’s simply saying this: on the occasion of physical stimuli, God creates the appropriate mental state. In other words, free will occasions can occur. And when those things happen, that’s when God supplies the appropriate mental state. Not some time in the past, pre-ordained, but at the moment it occurs. Let’s look at how this might be diagrammed.

S8:

Notice that our diagram here starts off very similar to Leibnitz’. Except that, instead of having bold lines, I’ve represented these with dotted lines. That’s because every dot represents a moment in a person’s life. It’s not pre-ordained. These are just individual moments that can freely occur or not occur: contingent moments rather than pre-ordained necessary moments. Again, the top line will represent our physical states, and the bottom line represents our mental states. And again, notice that the two lines are parallel and they don’t touch each other. So they don’t have a causal relationship between them, physical states and mental states. Basically what Malebranche said, was that he said the moment that a particular physical state freely occurs to me from somewhere in the world, somebody freely chooses to throw a pin, to jab me with a pin or throw a rock at me as you saw in our last little illustration there, at that moment, then, that’s when God supplies the appropriate mental state. Pain, for example, when that occurs there. Now, the strength of this view of course is that it solves the three previous views here. Ok, we don’t have the causal relationship that was a problem in our interaction view. We don’t have a parallel relationship correspondence with no explanation at all, as we had in our parallelism view. And we don’t have all that pre-ordination problem that we had with Leibnitz, that we had in the last view, pre-established harmony view. So there’s many good things about this that we can say. Malebranche maybe has really kind of solved the problem for us.

S9:

Well, has he really solved it? Has he really gotten us very far away from Leibnitz? He wants to argue that there are free events that occur in the world, that’s when God causes the appropriate mental state. But the problem with that is, we still have the problem of God being in control of my mental states. That in fact how I respond, or what happens when somebody hits me in the head with a rock as we have in our illustration here, God’s in charge of that. Well if my mental states are in God’s control it seems to me then I might have mental states that are still evil or sinful. I might think something terrible about somebody who sticks a pin in my arm or throws rocks at me. Or what about the person who picked up the rock to throw it at me? Obviously he had to make a choice to do that. Who was in control of his mental state at that particular point? Because, it involved physical actions: bending over, picking up a rock, throwing the rock. And those physical actions seem to be something that have to be accounted for mentally. Does God supply the mental state at that point? I’m not so sure that Malebranche got us very far from Leibnitz at this point. It seems that we still have a problem of evil, we still have a problem of who’s in control of my mental life. I don’t know if we’re very far from where we were with Leibnitz to be honest with you here.

Now all four of these views we’ve looked at so far – interactionism, parallelism, pre-established harmony, and occasionalism – have something in common. They’re all substance dualist views. Meaning that they believe that there are two substances, mind and body, that in some way or another relate to each other, and they’re just trying to figure out how this relationship takes place. One way to solve the problem is to eliminate one or both of these. And in fact that’s what we’re going to look at with some of our other views here.

S10:

One view that’s become very popular in recent years is called epiphenomenalism. It’s also known as the emergent property view. Now if you look at our diagram here, you’ll notice that we have our arrows again but we only have one arrow. The arrow is going from the brain, or the body, to the mind, showing that there’s a causal relationship but it’s only one way. What this view wants to say basically is this: that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. Now what that simply means is that we no longer have two substances any more that we’re trying to relate together, mind and brain. Now there’s only one substance, the brain. And one of the properties of the brain is this thing called the mind. The mind emerges out of the brain if it functions in a correct way. If it is functioning properly then the mind will emerge as a property of that. The brain then can cause the mind, have a causal relationship to the mind, but not vice versa in this process, in this idea here. Mental states are a byproduct of physical states. Now what do we mean by that idea, that mental states are a byproduct of physical states? Well, epiphenomenalism’s basic precept is that physical events, neural impulse, cause mental events, like thoughts or feelings, to occur. However mental events do not go on and cause other events like actions or behaviors. Regardless of what one thinks or feels, those thoughts or feelings don’t cause behavior, even though they might seem to, because there’s no connection between what one thinks, and what actions are done. Rather, the original neural event caused the subsequent action, not the mental thought or feeling. That was a byproduct of that neural event. The fact that the mental event comes after the neural event but before the actual behavior in time does not necessarily mean that the intervening mental event had anything to do with causing the behavior. In other words, it’s our example of a false cause. Just because A comes first and B comes second doesn’t mean that A caused B. Well, just because a neural event comes first and then the thoughts or feeling come afterwards, and then another event comes after that, doesn’t mean that those thoughts or feelings caused that second event to occur.

Let me see if I can give you an example of this. And I want to use a rather crude but example I think we can all identify with. Let’s suppose you have to go to the bathroom. Ok, you have to go and urinate. Ok, you get a neural event that tells you that your bladder is full. It sends a signal to your brain and tells you that you need to go empty your bladder. Now you get a mental state. The mental state says, I need to go use the bathroom. I need to go use the facilities. Ok, so you get up and you go use the bathroom. We normally think that the neural event caused me to have the mental state, and the mental state caused me to do the action of getting up to go use the bathroom. What the epiphenomenalist wants to argue is that, no, the neural event did cause that mental state, but the getting up and going to the bathroom is actually a result of the original neural event causing that action, not the mental state. The mental state was a byproduct. You had the mental state, I need to use the facilities, but it wasn’t the mental state that caused you to get up and go use the facilities. That’s what the epiphenomenalist wants to argue.

Now, the strength of this view? Well of course the biggest strength is that it solves all the other problems. We don’t have two substances we have to relate together, which was our original problem, how would these two substances relate together. We don’t have that any more. There’s only one substance and the property of that substance. Well that seems to be a pretty good strength for this view. But the problem with this view, and it seems to be a major problem with it in my opinion, is that this view can’t seem to account for actions that begin in the will, and not begin with neural events. In other words, maybe this is an explanation for how neural events occur. I don’t think it really is to be honest with you. But maybe it can do that. But one thing it can’t do is it can’t deal with actions that don’t begin with neural events but begin within my mind, that begin as an act of the will. For example, if I’m sitting in a classroom and I have a question. I want to raise my hand to ask, to be addressed, so I can ask my particular question. Well raising my hand is a physical event. But that physical event didn’t seem to begin with any sort of neural impulse or physical cue that I have like going to the bathroom. It began with a question that I had in my mind and willed to want to be addressed to be able to answer my questions. I raise my hand so I can be recognized for that purpose. That raising of my hand began as a willful action not as a neural event. So it seems to me that the epiphenomenalist has a difficult explaining, what do we do actions that begin with the will. Some way or another he has to reduce it to some sort of neural event, and it seems to me that’s going to be pretty difficult for him to do.

S11:

Our last two views are going to try to solve the problem by getting rid of one or the other, the mind or the body. Now what we looked at previously are four views that are substance dualist views that say that there are two substances, mind and body. The other view we looked at, the one we just looked at, says that there are two things involved, the brain and a property of the brain called the mind. These two views are going to say there’s only one thing involved. You either have a brain, or you have a mind, and that’s it.

This particular view, the one we’re looking at now, is called materialism. Notice here that we only have the bold figure, the brain or the body. This view wants to argue the fact that that’s all that there is. This view basically says, only one substance exists, matter. That’s all that we have is just matter. And in fact everything can be reducible to matter and material states. This view would then argue that there is no mind at all. All we have is just simply a brain. And everything that we have, every thought that we have, every emotion we have, can simply be reduced to the brain and neural states. In other words, this view wants to argue that, for example, if you feel angry or you feel very passionate love towards another person, that in fact it’s nothing more than a bunch of physical reactions that are occurring inside your neural network and that’s all it is. You may give it the name anger, but really anger is nothing more than your heart rate going up, your breathing maybe getting a little bit more shallow, certain chemicals are released into your system that cause certain reactions, tensing up of the muscles and things like that. And that’s really all anger is. It’s nothing more than just a bunch of physical things. That’s what the materialist wants to argue. So there are no mental states, really, just simply physical states. Now we might think those things are there. In fact, materialists have a word for that, they call it folk psychology. But in fact, none of that is really there at all. There’s nothing more than a bunch of physical states going on, that’s all that’s actually happening here. It’s just pure matter. This has become a very common view today. Scientific naturalists argue that all that exists is just matter and energy, and matter being converted to energy and energy being converted into matter, and in fact that’s all that’s happening with us as well. We’re nothing more than just material beings, and of course when we die the matter ceases to function. And we simply die and that’s the end of things. That’s basically the idea behind materialism.

S12:

Our last view also tries to solve the problem by getting rid of one or the other. Obviously if I don’t have a mind and a body, I can’t have a mind-body problem. This view tries to solve the problem by getting rid of the body. It’s called idealism or metaphysical idealism. What this view wants to say is, again, only one substance exists. But rather than saying it’s matter, they want to argue that the only thing that really exists is mental things. A mental existence. A mental thing called a brain, and mental states called ideas. And that everything is simply nothing more than an idea. Now this may seem in many ways the strangest view of all. You may have a hard time thinking, well, now wait a minute, my desk is just nothing more than an idea? Isn’t it made of matter? Well the person who’s most famous for arguing this was a person who was known as Bishop Berkeley. And you’ll read about him in your book. And it will be very interesting for you to read that. He had a very interesting theory that basically said that really all we’re experiencing here is nothing more than ideas. And since my mind can experience ideas, my mind has no problem relating to them. Since there is no physical thing at all, all that exists is mind and ideas. Well Berkeley’s theory has never really seriously caught on, although actually I think he’s got some very good arguments for his view. But nobody takes that today. Today the most common views are usually to hold to substance dualism in some way or another and try and see if there’s a way to work it out, or to adopt an epiphenomenalism view that the mind is just a property of the brain, or finally to adopt the materialist view that says there is no mind at all, all there is, is just brain. Well your book will discuss a lot more about how these problems work together and how they solve them. It might suggest some things there. And so I’ll let you go ahead and read that and find out more about it from that.

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