Person

SEVERAL THEORIES OF WHAT MAKES UP A PERSON

1) Cartesian dualism—what we’ve been reading about in the last several of Descartes’ Meditations—posits that there are two kinds of things, physical stuff and mental/spiritual stuff (often called the mind or the soul). The mind is what distinguishes a person from other entities. Such dualism has the benefit of taking mental phenomena and mental causation seriously but does so by ignoring some basic scientific principles. Among the problems it raises is the problem of mental causation that asks how a non-physical entity interacts with a physical entity. How can a non-physical thing like a thought convince a physical thing like a part of your body to respond? How, for example, can I think “lift my arm” and my arm lifts?

2 ) Materialism is the idea that the mind is nothing more than physical stuff. Material holds that only physical stuff exists and that persons are just physical stuff. That’s the idea used in the video “They’re Made of Meat.”

a. A subcategory of materialism is eliminative materialism—emotions and other subjective experiences are nothing more than neurobiological activity of a certain region of the brain. Abandons mental phenonomena

b. The argument from subjectivity says the flaw in materialism is that the subjective quality of experience can’t be explained through purely a materialistic account. Even after all the biology is provided, the awareness of what it’s like to have an emotion or other subjective experience persists.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel explains this in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” p 219 when he writes: “Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism… We may call this the subjective character of experience… Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to consciousness.”

3) A third, more recent theory, is emergentism which argues that the mind is an emergent feature of the brain but can’t be understood only by the physical brain functions. Emergentism has five characteristics:

1. The only things that exist in the world are material particles and the wholes make them up.

2. Unique properties do emerge out of the complex interaction of material parts of systems.

3. Emergent properties can’t simply be reduced to their material parts.

4. Emergent properties are both unpredictable and unexplainable from the laws governing the parts that are their origins.

5. Emergent properties have new powers that may have a causal impact on the material constituent parts from which they have arisen.

Philosopher John Searle, summarizes emergentism in The Rediscovery of the Mind, p 112 by writing “The existence of consciousness can be explained by (1) the causal interactions between elements of the brain at the micro level, but consciousness [mind] cannot itself be deduced or calculated from the sheer physical structure of the neurons without some additional account of (2) the causal relations between them.”

Among the problems with emergentism is the fact that characteristics 1 through 5 don’t easily fit in with our current scientific worldview