Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Minds, Brains and Computers - Handout - Philosophy of Mind, Large Format
Minds, Brains and Computers - Handout - Philosophy of Mind, Large Format
Introduction
i. Cartesian dualism
iii. Functionalism
Conclusions
Introduction
What is it to have a mind? We’re certain that anyone reading this
handout has a mind. But what are the special properties we consider
‘minded’ beings to have, and are these properties shared by other animals,
or even infants? In this lecture I introduce some of the approaches
contemporary philosophers have taken to the question of what it is to
have a mind.
Some terminology: I will use the term ‘mental state’ to refer to any
mental phenomenon, e.g. thoughts, emotions, sensations. So the thought
that beaver dams are cool, and the joy I feel when I see beavers building a
dam are examples of mental states that I can have.
Further reading
1
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
Material substances
Immaterial substances
>> To find out more about how Descartes argued for this position,
see Appendix 1.
2
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
Descartes faces the problem of explaining how minds can cause bodies to
move if they are made of substances which do not occupy a place in space.
Similarly, he will also need to explain how physical substances that we
ingest can affect our minds, as is the case with hallucinogens.
Further reading
Physicalism is the view that all that exists is physical stuff, that is, stuff
which has extension. Therefore, whatever our explanation of mental
phenomena is, it can’t go around citing immaterial stuff! This gets around
the problem of causation, because if mental phenomena consist in
physical stuff, just like our bodies, then they can interact with our bodies
to cause various behaviours.
There are two ways of spelling out the identity theory, which rely on the
token/type distinction.
3
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
This matters for our discussion because when an identity theorist says
that mental phenomena are identical with physical phenomena, we want
to know whether she thinks:
a) That types of mental phenomena (e.g. the type ‘feeling sad’, or the
type ‘feeling happy’) are identical with types of physical phenomena
(e.g. that ‘feeling sad’ can be reduced a particular chemical cocktail).
This is known as type- identity theory. 1
Or
b) That instances, or tokens, of mental phenomena are identical with
physical phenomena. On this view, you can just claim that the
happy feeling I had yesterday at 15:10 was identical with a physical
state. This is known as token- identity theory.
Type- identity theory claims that for every type of mental phenomenon
(feeling sad; feeling happy; wanting something or hating something) there
is a corresponding physical state. So pains are identical with C-fibre
activation2: my pain is identical with my C-fibres activation, and your pain
is identical with your C-fibres activation; my pain now is identical with C-
fibre activation and my pain yesterday lunch time was also identical with
the activity of my C-fibres.
Type- identity theory offers a stronger research program. It says that types
of physical states, e.g. a surge in endorphins, are identical with types of
mental state, e.g. feeling happy, and that this is the case for all humans.
Hilary Putnam, in his 1967 paper ‘The Nature of Mental States’ raised the
following objection to type-identity theory, arguing that it is too narrow.
Imagine that we find the cocktail of chemicals which we are certain is
type-identical to the mental state of feeling pain. Putnam says that all
we’ve done is find out the identity relation between pain and its physical
realisation in humans. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that octopus
brains are made up of totally different chemicals to human brains, but
that we have good reason to believe that these critters feel pain, e.g. they
withdraw from hot stimuli, they engage in avoidance behaviour around
those stimuli, we see a spike in their brain activity when they touch hot
things. Do we want to deny them pain because their brains are made up
of different stuff to ours? Of course not, says Putnam.
Multiple realisability
The key point for Putnam is that mental states are multiply realisable.
This just means that any mental state, e.g. the mental state of wanting a
pet beaver, can be instantiated in a variety of different physical systems.
It could be in a physical system made out of H2O and other chemicals
(like us) or a system made out of something totally different, like the
chemicals in an octopus brain.
5
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
is thus multiply realisable: there are lots of different things that are
currency in different cultures, but they all share a common role.
iii. Functionalism
Putnam’s big claim was that we should identify mental states not by what
they’re made of, but by what they do. And what mental states do is they
are caused by sensory stimuli and current mental states and cause
behaviour and new mental states.
The belief that tigers are dangerous is distinct from the desire to hug a
tiger in virtue of what that belief does. The desire to hug a tiger would
cause me to rush towards the tiger with open arms, and it might be
caused by the belief that tigers are harmless human-loving creatures.
Whereas the belief that tigers are dangerous is caused by my previous
knowledge that tigers eat people and that creatures with big teeth are
dangerous, and causes running away behaviour as well as new mental
6
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
states such as the dislike of the person who let the tiger into the room in
the first place. To make the contrast with type-identity clearer: on a type-
identity view what makes the belief that tigers are dangerous distinct from
the desire to hug a tiger is the different chemical cocktails which those
states consist in. But functionalists say that this is wrong: what makes
each of these states distinct is their different functional roles. They might
also be made of different chemicals, but that’s by-the-by. The interesting
difference lies in what causes them and what they do.
7
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
and Intelligence’ (1950) Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) proposed the following
thought experiment as a response to this question.
The next stage of the game is very similar, except that the man is replaced
by a computer, and the questioner’s task is to determine which of the
respondents is the human, and which is the computer. As before, the
computer’s task is to mislead the questioner into believing it is the
human, and the human-respondent’s task is to help the questioner.
Turing’s hypothesis was this: if a computer can consistently fool the
interrogator into believing that it is a human, then the computer has
reached the level of functional complexity required for having a mind.
(For a cinematic interpretation of the Turing Test, take a look at Ridley
Scott’s Bladerunner ).
In addition to this concern, one might wonder if the Turing test is too
limited: surely there might be beings who cannot persuade the questioner
that they are human but who we nevertheless want to count as minded.
The Turing test relies on language, and it sets very narrow criteria for
minds, namely, that they must be like human minds. But it is not a very
big stretch of the imagination to conceive of aliens who appear to act
intelligently but who would not be able to pass the Turing test.
Further reading
Now let’s suppose that outside of the room is a native speaker of Chinese.
Unbeknownst to you, she is posting questions in Chinese through the slot,
and you are giving her coherent answers to these questions. Although
believes she is conversing with someone who understands Chinese, you
9
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
actually do not understand any Chinese at all, you don’t even know that
you are engaged in a communicative act!
Searle is pointing to a fundamental issue facing the view that the mind is a
computing machine. Computers work by processing symbols. Symbols
have syntactic and semantic properties. Their syntactic properties are
their physical properties, e.g. shape. Their semantic properties are what
the symbol means, or represents. Thus, if I were to say “let be the
symbol for ‘start dancing’”, then its syntactic properties are that it has four
right angles and four equilateral sides, and its semantic property is that it
represents the instruction ‘start dancing’, and that in certain contexts
when we perceive this symbol we should start to dance.
The problem is that the computer does not ‘know’ that it is manipulating
symbols that have semantic content any more than the person inside
Searle’s Chinese room knows she is manipulating Chinese characters.
This leads to a fundamental issue with the claim that the mind is a
computing machine: what part of the machine understands the symbols
that it is manipulating? With a computer it doesn’t matter that the
machine’s processing has nothing to do with the semantic content of the
symbols, because it is the humans who use the machine that have this
information, we are the ones who give meaning to those symbols. But if
the mind is just a processor which operates on the syntactic properties of
symbols, then how can it produce a being who can understand the
meaning of the symbols? How can a mind think about dogs, when all it
recognises are the syntactic properties of that symbol? Where is the
‘programmer’ who deciphers the meaning of all the symbols?
10
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
11
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
Conclusions
The aim of this lecture was to introduce some of the core topics in
contemporary philosophy of mind. We began by looking at the merits of
physicalism over Cartesian Dualism. We then turned to how the
physicalist position has played out, first through identity theories and
then through functionalism. Functionalist was the catalyst for the
popular move to start thinking of minds as computers, information
processing machines which operate on the syntactic structures of
symbols. By thinking about our minds containing symbols which can
represent states of affairs, we begin to address one of the fundamental
questions in the philosophy of mind: how can thoughts be about things?
12
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
Further reading
Clark, A. (2001) Mindware: an introduction to the philosophy of cognitive
science O.U.P.
13
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
There are several arguments which Descartes offers for his dualistic
account of the mind, but the most famous is the argument from doubt
(Discourse, second meditation):
Descartes believed that this argument shows that the mind must be made
of a different substance to his body and other things found in the physical
world. This is because it has a property which physical things do not: its
existence cannot be doubted. To put it another way: I can imagine that
the physical world does not exist, but it is impossible for me to imagine
that I don’t exist because there has to be something which is doing the
imagining! Hence the famous Cogito: ‘I think therefore I am’. In order to
think, there must be something which is doing the thinking (namely, me).
An example might help here.3 Let’s imagine that I am unaware that Dr.
Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. I can imagine a scenario where Dr. Jekyll apprehends
Mr. Hyde and leaves him in the custody of the police, going home to a
warm supper whilst Mr. Hyde languishes in the cells cursing Jekyll. Yet
this imagining does not inform me of what is in fact possible. Rather, it
reveals a limitation on my knowledge which cannot be appreciated from
my current perspective. It is perfectly logical to state that if two things
have different properties then those two things distinct. But this doesn’t
3
My thanks to Dr. Paul Sludds who thought of this example!
14
Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
hold once we throw psychological terms in there: ‘If I believe two things
to have different properties then they are distinct’. This is because my
belief might not match on to how the world actually is. I believe that Dr.
Jekyll has the property of being kind, and that Mr. Hyde lacks this
property (being a murdering psychopath), and I infer from this that
because Dr Jekyll has a property that Mr. Hyde lacks, they must be
distinct people. This believing, however, does not preclude the possibility
that they are identical.
15