– ‘Philosophy of Mind’ seeks to address and focuses on a single problem – namely, the nature of what we understand as “mind”. Its central questions are: what is consciousness? What is a mind? And how do minds relate to physical bodies?
INTRODUCTION
Questions about mind are metaphysical questions, because they concern the nature of things in the world, and their answers fall into two broad categories: The first is called “dualism”, which claims there are two kinds of things in the universe, one of which is matter, and one of which is mind. The second is called “monism”, which claims there is only one kind of thing in the universe – either matter, mind, or something else of which matter and mind are attributes.
The question of how the mind relates to the body is a relatively recent one. It dates from the 17th century, when René Descartes divided the world into two: into the material world, which he argued is predetermined and runs like clockwork, and the immaterial world, in which the human mind is located. He made the distinction because all around him “science” was taking root: Galileo and Kepler had laid Aristotle’s cosmology to rest, meaning that a new view of the universe was required. However, Descartes saw that if the universe runs like clockwork, as scientists were claiming, then human freedom is impossible. And so he argued that there is an immaterial world in which the immaterial mind holds sway. This is the classic dualist position: that the mind and body are distinct things, and that they remain so even if their interaction is a mystery. Although it fell out of favour for many years, dualism is having a resurgence today, largely due to the shortcomings of monist accounts of the mind.
Today, most monists are “materialists”, or “physicalists”, who claim that consciousness is simply a neuro-chemical function of the brain. From this view, pains, joys, hopes and intentions are all ultimately physical in nature. Some argue that ideas such as “mind” and “consciousness” are little more than “folk psychology” – that is, part of a family of concepts that we use in everyday life but are not rooted in scientific fact. Another form of monism is “behaviourism”, which has its roots in the philosophy of language. Behaviourists claim that words such as “clever” and “kind” describe outward, bodily behaviour, which we then mistake for internal, “mental” processes. Ludwig Wittgenstein made a similar point, arguing that questions about the mind tend to arise when “language goes on holiday”. Wittgenstein was neither a monist nor a dualist, but argued instead that metaphysical questions – particularly those that involve distinctions between the “mind” and the “body” and the “inner” and “outer” realms – are the result of linguistic confusion.
DUALISM
The idea that reality is dual in nature – that is made up of both physical and mental elements – was championed by the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes.
Mind and body
According to Descartes, physical objects exist in space and are governed by physical laws: a tree, for example, has a certain height, width, mass, and location. However, he argued the same is not true of the human mind or its attributes: beliefs, pains, and plans have no such characteristics, and so cannot be regarded as physical. For Descartes, the mind has no material substance – it is a pure subject of experience that goes beyond the otherwise clockwork machinery of the world. Only humans, he believed, enjoy such freedom; all other creatures are determined by the laws of nature.
Having split the world into mind and matter, Descartes questioned how the two interact. He suggested that they “commingle” in the pineal gland of the brain but was unable to say how they do so. Indeed, explaining the interaction between mind and matter is difficult for a dualist, for the mind (being immaterial) can never be found to see how it works: it is always the subject of experience, but never its object. And so, if ever a physical object, such as a brain or a computer, is presented as being a mind, a dualist knows in advance that it is not. Likewise, if a materialist states that pain is simply electrical activity in the brain, this only deepens the mystery, for we know that conscious awareness – the feeling of being stung by a bee – is bound up with bodily processes. The mystery is the nature of that bond, and how a physical brain can do anything as strange as feel.
The hard problem
Today, what is called the “hard problem of consciousness” reformulates Descartes’ thought: that no amount of science gets us any closer to understanding what it is to be conscious – to have direct experience of colours, scents, and sounds. According to this view, science describes the world as it is “out there” and does so from the vantage point of experience. But the vantage point itself – the place where experience occurs – can never itself be seen: the subject of experience can never become its object. As David Chalmers, a defender of “naturalistic dualism”, puts it: “Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange”.
🔎 QUALIA
Philosophers use the word “qualia” to describe the immediate contents of experience – what it feels like to experience a particular sound, for instance. Frank Jackson used this example: Mary lives in a black-and-white world, in which she learns everything there is to know about colour from books and television documentaries. She is then taken out into the real world and experiences colour for the first time. What she is introduced to are qualia – qualities that, according to dualists, cannot be explained by materialist accounts of the mind.
A materialist may say that Mary knows everything there is to know about colour, even in her black-and-white world, simply by studying it.
Mary’s entry into the world highlights the dualist’s case – the colour is not a theory, but an experience.
“Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.” – René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637)
THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE
In the 1940s, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein raised questions about the nature of language that cast doubt on the very idea of a “philosophy of mind”.
Shadows and grammar
In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that the meaning of a word is not an object it refers to, but a rule that governs its use. Such rules, he claimed, must be public, shared convictions, which can change according to context. With this claim, he undermined Descartes’ assumption that knowledge starts with the individual, and that certainty can be gained through direct, private experience. According to Descartes, we learn the word “pain” by associating it with a feeling and then applying our experience to other people. Wittgenstein, however, argued that the opposite is true: we learn the word “pain” while interacting with others, whose behaviour we describe. We say that someone is “in pain” when they act in certain ways, just as we might say someone is “angry” or “clever” according to their behaviour.
The crucial point is that our relationship with our private feelings and sensations, far from being a bedrock of certainty, is not one of “knowing” at all. A person could never say, for example, “I think I am in pain, but I may not be.” According to Wittgenstein, to say “I am in pain” is not a description, it is pain-behaviour itself – a cry for help.
Indescribable pain
For Wittgenstein, language is intersubjective – a phenomenon established between subjects, or people, rather than between a subject and itself. The criteria for saying that another person is in pain, for example, are behavioural. However, this is not the case when we say that we ourselves are in pain, because there are no criteria for describing private sensations. To say “I am in pain” is effectively a call for help.
Whereof one cannot speak
Even more problematic for Wittgenstein was Descartes’ use of the word “I” in the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” In everyday usage, the word “I” is used to distinguish one individual from another: if a teacher asks, “who wrote on the board?” and a pupil says, “I did”, the pupil does so to distinguish themselves from the rest of the class. But Descartes used “I” to distinguish his mind from his body, creating a void in which he located his “thought”. For Wittgenstein, using the word “I” in this way is meaningless as it lacks its logical neighbour of “others”. He said it is an example of what happens when “language goes on holiday”.
Wittgenstein’s point is not that there is no such thing as the mind of consciousness, but that we lack the words with which to frame such metaphysical questions – or rather, that when language is kept on the “rough ground” of ordinary usage, such questions disappear. As he said in his earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
🔎 BEETLE IN A BOX
Descartes claimed that we can doubt that other people are conscious, but not that we are conscious. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argued that there is nothing in consciousness that only we can know. He imagined a community in which everyone keeps a “beetle” in a box. “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.” In such a world, the word “beetle” could refer to any number of things (even empty space), and so would have no meaning. The same would be true if the word “pain” described a purely private phenomenon: whatever it referred to could not be shared. However, if it cannot be shared, it cannot have meaning, for, according to Wittgenstein, meaning is a public, shared convention.
BEHAVIOURISM
Behaviourist philosophers claim that the “mind/body problem” is an illusion created by a certain misuse of language – one that mistakes descriptions of behaviour for mental attributes.
Ghost in the machine
In claiming that there is only one kind of substance in the universe, namely matter, behaviourism is both a “monist” and a “materialist” doctrine. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle popularised the idea in 1949, in his book The Concept of Mind. He argued that dualists make a “category mistake” when they describe the mind as a non-physical thing, which they then endow with supernatural powers such as “seeing” and “thinking”. For Ryle, this “ghost in the machine”, as he calls it, creates an infinite regress (a never-ending sequence of reasoning): if it is not the physical eye that sees, but some ghostly mind-eye behind it, then the ghostly eye needs another eye behind it to do its seeing, and so on. Ryle’s answer is that there are no mental processes: there is only physical behaviour, which we wrongly objectify as the “mind”. This goes far beyond Wittgenstein’s claim that subjective phenomena lie outside the realm of sensitive discourse.
For behaviourists, to be in a given mental state (such as happiness) is to behave in a certain way (such as to laugh and smile). Attributes such as intelligence are best understood as adjectives describing the body rather than nouns denoting non-physical entities or properties. Logical behaviourism, as advanced by Rudolf Carnap, takes this further, claiming that to say, “I am happy” means “I am smiling, laughing, and so on”, which few would defend today. However, Carnap’s view highlights a problem with behaviourism, that it omits the phenomenon of experience. Few would say that their pain, for example, is a way in which they behave – an objection that strengthens the dualists’ case.
🔎 INTERNALISED SPEAKING
A common objection to behaviourism is the fact that we spend so much of our time thinking, which has nothing to do with behaviour, but is instead an entirely internal, mental process. However, behaviourists argue that thinking is simply internalised speaking, and that speaking is by definition behavioural. Just as we learn to speak in a family group, so we learn arithmetic by being shown the rules by a teacher. At first, we write our calculations down, and then we learn to make them in our heads. However, we are “thinking” as much with a pen as without one. This argument is loosely based on Wittgenstein’s “private language argument,” which claims that language is a public activity that can never begin with the individual.
Thinking aloud – Whether we think publicly, on paper, or privately, in our heads, is irrelevant, according to Ryle.
Thinking quietly – Ryle argues that thinking “in one’s head” is simply internalised speaking.
Intelligent make-up
According to behaviourism, mental attributes are simply functions of behaviour. To be intelligent, for example, is to possess a certain set of abilities, such as to do maths, or to speak articulately. These attributes are evident in a person’s behaviour; they are not private properties of the “mind”.
✔ NEED TO KNOW
. Ludwig Wittgenstein did not consider himself a behaviourist, but he is often categorised as such (see: The Limits of Language, above). His ideas greatly influenced Gilbert Ryle.
. Logical behaviourism has its roots in the positivist doctrine of verificationism (which is associated with Analytical Philosophy and meaning and observation).
. Behaviourist psychology was pioneered by John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner in the 1920s.
THE MIND-BRAIN IDENTITY THEORY
In the late 1950s, the philosophers U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart, and Herbert Feigl reformulated an old idea: that mental states are simply physical states of the brain.
The mind machine
In Is Consciousness a Brain Process? U.T. Place claimed that the behaviourist argument – that mental states are defined by behaviour – is insufficient, and that mental states are a way of describing neurological events. He argued that the distinction between the concept’s “sensation” and “brain state” is like that between “lightning” and “electrical discharge”. In both cases, the former phrase is like an informal, personal report, and should not be taken literally, whereas the latter is a scientific claim, and means exactly what it says. Place also argued that the first kind of statement can be reduced to the second, so that, just as lightning is in fact an electrical discharge, pain is in fact a particular state of the brain.
J.J.C. Smart and Herbert Feigl came to the same conclusion but claimed that “sensation” and “brain state” are related in the way that Frege links “morning star” and “evening star”. In each case, both terms have their own meaning but refer to the same thing: in Frege’s case, the planet Venus; in Smart and Feigl’s, the brain. Hilary Putnam noted that an alien species might experience pain but have no brain, suggesting that mental states need not be of the same physical “type”. Instead, he proposed that we identify mental state “tokens”, such as a specific individual’s pain, with specific physical tokens, such as the relevant parts of an individual’s body.
Identity crisis
A major limitation of the identity theory is that it cannot account for subjective experience. This has been a problem since the idea was formulated by the Greek Atomists, who claimed that the soul was made of physical atoms. Indeed, when Thomas Hobbes popularised the theory in the 17th century, it only strengthened Descartes’ dualist alternative, for all its mysteries.
Causal completeness
One argument for the identity theory lies in what is known as the “causal completeness” of the universe. Sight, for example, begins with photons passing through the lens of the eye, and ends with a physical reaction, such as flinching from a flame. The entire process is marshalled by the brain, which sends signals to the body to trigger the relevant reaction, leaving no role for the mind to play. From this perspective, the mind is irrelevant, or a “ghost in the machine”, in the words of Gilbert Ryle.
🔎 PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY
Gottfried Leibniz addressed the fact that in a causally complete universe the mind is casually ineffective. For Leibniz, the mind and the brain are separate entities, but do not interact with each other. They seem to interact, but that is only because God arranged the world to keep the two in step. They exist in what Leibniz called a state of pre-established harmony. His idea is like Baruch Spinoza’s concept of parallelism.
Sensations – When we see and touch a flower, we may think that we are experiencing private sensations (such as what the flower smells like), but identity theorists, or physicalists, would say that this is an illusion. In their view, what we are experiencing is in fact a series of physical events, triggered by signals in the brain.
Intentions – How can one person’s intention to give another person flowers, for example, be a physical event in the brain? For physicalists, to “intend” something is no different from “doing” something: it is a shorthand description of a particular set of behaviours, all of which are describable by science.
Emotions – According to physicalists, emotions, like intentions, are behavioural states that are observable, and as such, unmysterious. To be angry or depressed is to be disposed to behave in certain ways, and these depend on the chemical make-up of an individual’s brain.
Identity – Our personal identity, from our ethnicity and language to our way of dressing, is either biologically or culturally conditioned – and cultural conditioning, physicalists argue, is nothing other than behaving in certain ways.
ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
The mind-brain identity theory has been abandoned in recent years by various materialist philosophers, in favour of an even more radical position – namely, eliminative materialism.
The science of mind
Unlike proponents of the identity theory, who argue that statements about the mind can be reduced to statements about the brain, eliminative materialists claim that since mental states do not exist, there is nothing to identify them with.
An example of this view, held by philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, is that a person may think she is sad because her dog has died, but in fact she is sad because her serotonin levels have dropped. Indeed, her sadness is nothing other than her lowered serotonin levels, and their lowering is linked to the physiology of her “love” for her dog. Saying that she is sad may elicit sympathy and help from others – which are also physical processes – but the truth is that a certain physical process (X) has caused another physical process (Y), which in turn has caused other physical processes (Z). Explaining behaviour in terms of “beliefs”, “desires”, and “reasons” is, according to eliminativists, like explaining diseases in terms of miasma, or ascribing mental illnesses to demonic possession. Such ideas, they say, belong to a time before empirical science, when folk tales and superstition were all that people had to rely on.
Daniel Dennett argues that we ascribe intelligence to a system when we are ignorant of its design: for example, we might say that a computer “knows” how to play chess because we fail to grasp its workings. For Dennett, complex systems appear intentional (capable of thought) when viewed “from the top down”, but mechanical when viewed “from the bottom up”. Eliminativists claim that we ascribe joys, pains, and sensations to ourselves in a similar way: because we fail to know our workings.
The fate of folk psychology
The everyday language we use to explain human behaviour, including such concepts as “belief”, “desire”, and “intention”, are what philosophers call “folk psychology”. According to eliminative materialists, folk psychology is effectively a failed scientific hypothesis, and as such, it should join the list of other failed hypotheses.
✔ Phlogiston theory vs Oxidation
In the 17th century, Johann Joachim Becher attempted to explain the processes of combustion and rusting. He suggested that fire is caused by the release of an element called “phlogiston” into the air.
The phlogistion theory was superceded by the theory of oxidation in the 18th century. Antoine Lavoisier discovered that both combustion and rusting are caused by a chemical reaction between certain substances and an element in the air. He called the new element “oxygène”.
✔ Miasma theory vs Germ theory
For centuries, throughout the world, many diseases were thought to be caused by “miasma”, or “bad air”, released by rotting organic matter. Swamps and bogs were considered particularly miasmatic, and so were avoided when possible.
In the 19th century, the chemists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch demonstrated that many diseases are caused by microorganisms invading the body. Bacteria, viruses, and fungi are among the many “germs” now known to cause disease.
✔ Folk psychology vs Neuroscience
Today, as in the past, many people believe that their lives are influenced by their “beliefs”, “desires”, and “intentions”. Likewise, they believe that their moods, thoughts, and sensations are non-physical phenomena that exist in the special, private domain of the “mind”.
Eliminativists believe that one day, neuroscience will replace folk psychology. They argue that nothing about human beings is private or takes place in a separate domain called the “mind”. All our moods, thoughts, and sensations are simply bodily processes.
The crucible of science
Eliminativists claim that science has shown that the “mind” is a fictional entity.
FUNCTIONALISM
In the 1960s, several philosophers put forward a functionalist theory of mind, taking ideas from Aristotle and modern computer science. Functionalism focuses on what the mind does, rather than what it is.
Can a machine think?
According to Aristotle, to know a thing is to know its purpose. Likewise, for functionalists, the important thing about the mind is not what it is, but what it does. The function of pain, for example, is to alert us to the fact that we are injured, just as the function of the heart is to pump blood around the body. Intelligence is also a function – an ability to do maths, for instance.
When asked, “Can a machine think?”, the computer scientist Alan Turing famously replied, “Can a submarine swim?” His point was that how we use the word “swim” is a matter of convention, and that the same is true of the word “think”. He then devised a thought experiment to show that a machine could be said to “think” under certain specific circumstances.
In The Nature of Mental States and other articles, Hilary Putnam developed this idea, arguing that mental states are comparable to software: they are functional states of “computational machines”, such as brains. Just as computers are able to process electronic inputs to make outputs, so the brain can turn perceptual inputs (the information we gather through our senses) into behaviour. This powerful idea remains influential today. However, critics argue that calling the mind a computer puts the cart before the horse – that computers are built to simulate human activity, and that “processing” is only a minor aspect of consciousness.
🔎 ARTIFICIAL HUMANS
The Turing test raises several interesting questions. Suppose, for example, that the machine in the room is far more sophisticated than the one used in the test. Suppose it is identical to a human being and is no longer kept in the room. Suppose it walks among us and is programmed to react with apparent emotion. If we are happy to call it “intelligent” because it passes the Turing test, are we happy to say that it “feels”? If not, is that because we merely built it? It can always be argued that we are equally “built” – by physics, biology, and evolution.
The Turing test
Developed by Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing test provides criteria for assessing artificial intelligence. A human, a machine, and a human adjudicator are isolated in separate rooms. The adjudicator has no idea which room contains the machine, and which contains the human. He communicates with the machine and the other human via print-outs, on which he also receives their replies. If, after a certain number of questions, he is unable to distinguish between the two, then the machine has passed the test. It can be said to be intelligent, and upgrades of its system can be said to increase its intelligence.
Questions
The adjudicator sends questions into the rooms in which the machine and the human are isolated. He does not know which room the machine or the human is in. His goal in asking the questions is to distinguish which is which.
Machine
The machine answers the questions in a human-like way as it is programmed in the rudiments of natural language.
Human
The human’s answers to the adjudicator’s questions need not be “correct”. All that matters is that they identify her as human, not a machine.
Answers
The adjudicator prints out the replies. If he is unable to tell which are the human’s and which are the machine’s, then the machine has passed the test: it has demonstrated intelligent behaviour.
“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.” – Alan Turning, computer scientist and mathematician
✔ NEED TO KNOW
. In De Anima, Aristotle defined the soul as: “the first actuality of a natural body having in it the capacity of life”. The soul, or mind, is thus an activity of a thing: its potential becoming actual
. Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the mind as a “calculating machine” was a precursor to modern functionalism
. Modern functionalism was developed as an alternative to the mind-brain identity theory and behaviourism
BIOLOGICAL NATURALISM
The philosopher John Searle argues that functionalists are misled by the computer model of the mind, which is at best a useful metaphor. He sees the mind as a natural property of matter.
The Chinese room
According to Searle, the mistake that functionalists make in their model of the mind arises from confusing the syntax of a sentence with its semantics. The syntax of a sentence is its grammatical structure, which can be reduced to symbolic logic. Its semantics, however, are the meanings it conveys. The same semantics can thus be conveyed by an infinite number of languages, which have unique syntactical structures.
Searle makes the following analogy. A person sits in a room and has cards marked with Chinese characters passed to them under the door. The person has no understanding of Chinese but has a rule-book that instructs them on how to respond: “If character X appears under the door, then respond with character Y”, and so on. The person can communicate using this system and could even be mistaken for someone who speaks Chinese. For Searle, this is how computers work: they have instructions but no understanding; syntax but no semantics. And so, when a functionalist claims that the mind and the brain are like a computer and its software, they omit what they try to explain: the phenomenon of understanding.
Searle’s own position is known as “biological naturalism”. He says that both dualism and neurological reductionism are mistaken. For him, consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and may well be caused by the brain. Indeed, mental properties are a type of physical property – ones that, science may show, provide us with subjectivity.
Evidence of nothing
Searle’s “Chinese room” argument demonstrates the limitations of functionalism. Searle argues that just as the person in the room does not understand, so a computer that passes the Turing test cannot be said to “think”. Let’s examine this.
Human Machine – A person “speaks Chinese” by using an instruction manual to respond to characters passed through a slot in the door. He has no understanding of what is being communicated.
The person in the room obviously speaks Chinese.
Message Received – A native Chinese speaker reads the message communicated by the person in the locked room and comes to the wrong conclusion: that the person speaks Chinese.
“My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.” – John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs (1984)
🔎 LEIBNIZ’S MILL
In the 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz made an argument that is like the “Chinese room”. He asks us to imagine a machine that simulates human behaviour and supposedly has “perception”. It could be the size of a mill, so we could enter it and watch its workings. We would not, he argues, conclude that it is conscious: “Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for.”
PANPSYCHISM
In recent years, many philosophers have taken a new interest in dualism – and in the ancient idea of a “universal mind”.
The hard problem
The philosopher David Chalmers claims that we have yet to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness – namely what it is to be conscious. In so doing, he revives the dualist claim that no amount of physics can explain what it is to feel. Chalmers observes that if materialism were true, experience would not be necessary. If I burn my hand on a stove, and the fact that I take my hand away is explained by neurological processes, why do I need to feel pain? Why are we not, effectively, “zombies” – creatures identical to humans, but lacking subjectivity?
Unlike thermostats, which also react to temperature changes, humans have an extra, “inner” dimension, which resists physical description. But in a world of physical objects, how has this come about? One answer is that the mind, while not a “substance” in Descartes’ sense, is a fundamental property of the universe. According to this view, known as “panpsychism”, matter and mind are always bound together. Stones are not “aware” because they lack sensory organs, but mind exists within them. For panpsychists, the things that we would describe as “conscious” are merely those that are biologically like us. This idea was prevalent in the 19th century, and was only displaced by positivist ideas, which have since fallen out of favour. It was originally formulated by Anaxagoras and was recently defended by physicist David Bohm. In his novel theory of the cosmos, Anaxagoras suggested that, as it derives from a single original substance, everything in the physical universe contains a portion of everything else. Anaxagoras is credited with bringing philosophy to Athens in around 460 BCE, and inspiring Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
“The seed of everything is in everything else.” – Anaxagoras, 5th century BCE
Russellian monism
In his 1927 book The Analysis of Matter, Bertrand Russell argued that science describes the extrinsic (external) properties of matter, such as the shape, quantity, and disposition of things, but says nothing about matter’s intrinsic (internal) nature – about what it is in itself. Indeed, according to this view, the inability of science to describe intrinsic natures is what creates the mind-body problem, which is effectively a conceptual vacuum. “Russellian monists” argue that consciousness is a hidden property of matter: it cannot be examined by science, yet it is present in everything, from rocks to humans, in varying complexity.
🔎 SCHOPENHAUER’S WILL
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was an important figure in the development of panpsychism. He was influenced by Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal world of the senses and the world of the thing-in-itself. However, while Kant thought that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, Schopenhauer said that humans have special access to what they are in themselves. Through introspection, he argued, we encounter the “Will” – which, far from being a desire, is the driving force of the universe.
Schopenhauer, however, was a pessimist. He believed that the Will is inherent in everything in the world, but is impersonal, aimless, and without consciousness. It is the cause of our insatiable desires, which bring about suffering, and to find peace we must learn to overcome it through compassion.
THE NATURE OF BODY
The linguist Noam Chomsky argues that the mind/body problem is one that could only be formulated for a brief time during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The mechanical philosophy
Throughout the medieval period, Aristotelian ideas prevailed in Europe, chiefly in the form of scholastic philosophy, which married Aristotle’s ideas with Catholic beliefs. Aristotle argued, for example, that a rock rolls downhill because it belongs at the centre of the Earth, while fire rises in an attempt to reach the heavens. By the 16th century, magnets and iron filings were said to be “sympathetic” to each other, and so attract. The Scientific Revolution, which began in the 17th century, sought to replace such supernatural explanations with causal, mechanical ones. The assumption was that once the causes of a thing are known, there is nothing left to explain. This was illustrated in 1739 by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson: he built a mechanical duck that ate, digested, and defecated kernels of grain. This “mechanical philosophy” was first adopted by Galileo Galilei (“the father of modern science”), and pursued by his successor, Isaac Newton.
At the end of his life, Isaac Newton claimed to have failed at his task. What had foiled him was the force that he had discovered: gravity. For gravity does nothing if not “act at a distance” – drawing the Earth around the Sun without pulleys, cogs, or chains. He called gravity “so great an absurdity” that no-one could entertain it – and yet there it was, effectively a “supernatural force” governing the heavens. Matter, in short, became a mystery again, and scientists redefined the nature of their task. They became less concerned with “understanding” the world as such than formulating theories that rendered it intelligible – a far humbler task than Galileo had envisaged.
For Noam Chomsky, this has implications for the philosophy of mind. His point is that matter, far from being a simple mechanism that the mind can be said either to be or to interact with, is itself something we have no clear definition of. Following C.S. Peirce, Chomsky distinguishes “problems”, which fall within our cognitive abilities to solve, from “mysteries”, which lie outside our cognitive scope. According to this view, mind, matter, and their possible interaction may well be a mystery, but perhaps in the way that a clockwork duck is a mystery to a real one.
Science and intelligibility
According to Chomsky, science underwent a revolution in the 17th century that remains largely forgotten today. The belief then was that science would explain the mysteries of the world, but Newton showed that this is not always possible. Often, the best science can do is generate models of the world that enable us to discuss it, which should not be confused with understanding the world as it is.
[1] The world explained – In medieval Europe, everything was, in a sense, explained. Life, the world, and the heavens were described in scholastic terms, with no distinction between “body” and “mind”. A magnet attracts iron because the two were said to be “sympathetic”.
[2] The world redefined – In the 17th century, Descartes split the world into two: body and mind. Crucially, he defined “body” in pure mechanical terms, describing physical systems as machines that have purposes and are driven by the equivalent of gears and pulleys.
[3] The world becomes a mystery – Newton concluded that one of the two substances described by Descartes doesn’t exist – namely, body. The phenomenon of “action at a distance”, as displayed by gravity, shows that the world is not mechanical, and is, therefore, a mystery.
[4] Rendering the world intelligible – Although body, or “matter”, remains a mystery, scientists and philosophers can still construct models to describe it. Their aim is to create a model of matter that accounts for the mind without reducing it to something else.
This completes the page on Philosophy of Mind. Amendments to the above entries may be made in future.
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