Philosophy of Knowing - Notes

 Chapters 1, 2, 3

Identity Theory

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. Consider an experience of pain, or of seeing something, or of having a mental image. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes.

Some philosophers hold that though experiences are brain processes they nevertheless have fundamentally non-physical, psychical, properties, sometimes called ‘qualia’. Here I shall take the identity theory as denying the existence of such irreducible non-physical properties. Some identity theorists give a behaviouristic analysis of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but others say that mental states are actual brain states. Identity theorists often describe themselves as ‘materialists’, but ‘physicalists’ may be a better word.

The identity theory (in its various forms) may be considered as an ontological physicalism. A physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms.

In other words, the simplest proposal for explaining how the mental is nothing but the physical is the identity theory. In his classic paper “Materialism” (1963), the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart proposed that every mental state is identical to a physical state in the same way as the episodes of lightning are identical to episodes of electrical discharge, for instance. The primary argument for this view is that it enables a kind of economy in one’s account of the different kinds of things in the world, as well as a unification of causal claims: mental events enter into causal relations with physical ones because in the end they are physical events themselves. This view is also called reductionism, which conveys the suggestion that the mental phenomenon is “made less” or reduced to being physical phenomenon.

In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state desire for a cup of coffee would thus be nothing more than the firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions. On such a view, it would turn out that any two people with a desire for a cup of coffee would have a similar type of neuronal firing pattern in similar regions of the brain.

Summary of Identity Theory

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Philosophy of God/Religion - Notes

Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4

Goodnight Talk: Love heals the foundations of suffering

James Finley says, “In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny. From the reciprocity of love, destiny is fulfilled, and the foundations of suffering are healed. Love and love alone has the authority to name who we are.”

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. However we view suffering and pain, it is necessary to accept them. The more we accept them, the better and more mature we will be.

Testimony of James Finley:

We cannot attain spiritual maturity if we are not able to integrate our pains and sufferings with our spiritual life. We must be even able to integrate the trauma and the abuses that we have experienced in our past.

I was raised in a home with a lot of trauma—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and I was very fragmented by all of it. I graduated from high school, ran away from home, joined a monastery, and became a monk.

When I entered the monastery, I thought I had left the trauma behind me. I was in this silent cloister, with Thomas Merton for my spiritual director. I was walking around reading the works of St John of the Cross, and I felt like I had reached my goal, really. And then I was sexually abused by one of the monks, my confessor. It completely shattered me. I never thought it was possible. I didn’t see it coming. I was not able to cope with the stress, and was very much disturbed: I was split in two. Now what was left of me were feelings of fear and confusion over which I didn’t have much control. There was no refuge for me. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I just left. I started a new life as a way to bury all the pain and move on.

Years later, I found myself in therapy and all hell broke loose. But with prayer and gentle pacing, I learned to see, feel, accept, and find my way through the long-term internalized effects of the trauma I had to endure in my childhood and adolescence. It was in this process that I came upon an intimate experience of who I am. By becoming vulnerable, by re-visiting the pain that I endured, I discovered the loving presence of God. The healing that I received by opening the wounds, was simultaneous with the discovery of God’s intimate presence, loving presence. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we unexpectedly come upon within ourselves what Jesus calls the pearl of great price: the invincible preciousness of our self.

In the act of admitting what we are so afraid to admit—especially if admitting means admitting it in our body, where we feel it in painful waves—in that scary moment of feeling and sharing what we thought would destroy us, we unexpectedly discover within ourselves this invincible love that sustains us unexplainably in the midst of the painful situation we are in.

As we learn to trust in this paradoxical way God sustains us in our suffering, we are learning to connect our heart to God, who protects us from nothing. He protects us from nothing, rather exposes us to everything. But at the same time, He unexplainably and mysteriously sustains us in all things. As this process of transformation continues, we find within ourselves the gifts of courage, patience, and tenderness to deal with our hurts, pains, abuses, sufferings, trauma. To deal with them with love. To integrate them into love, so that they too become love. In this way, we can become a gift and miracle to the world with our very presence.

Cartesian Dualism

Descartes’ Dualism and the Problem of the Bridge

Dualism, simply put, is the belief that something is composed of two fundamentally different components. Descartes believed that a human person consisted of:

Matter/Body: The physical stuff that walks, talks, and lives a life.

Mind: The non-physical substance (sometimes equated with the soul) that thinks, doubts, and remembers things.

He introduced a division between mind and body in order to refute scepticism, using the method of universal doubt.

Descartes believed in a mechanistic view of the material world—that matter goes about its business and follows its own laws, except when it is interfered with by the mind. Human mind, then, simply makes the body act (like a machine). Exactly how the non-physical mind interacts with the physical body is a point of contention. Descartes believed that the pineal gland in the brain was the locus of interaction between the mind and body because he believed that this gland was the only part of the brain that wasn’t a duplicate.

It’s important to remember that, for Descartes, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain serves, in part, as a connection between the mind and the body, but because it is a physical, changeable thing, it is not the actual mind. Our mind is whole and indivisible, whereas our body can be changed. You can cut your hair, remove your appendix, or even lose a limb, but that loss in no way reduces your mind.

Descartes also believed that human were the only dualistic creatures. He placed animals in the realm of the purely physical, mechanistic world, acting purely on instinct and on the laws of nature.

Descartes was led to his dualistic theories in part from his most famous philosophical endeavour—to place into doubt all that could be doubted in the hope of arriving at a basic, undeniable truth. That resulted in his famous Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Descartes could doubt the existence of the physical world and that even his own body actually existed, but he could not doubt the idea that his mind existed because doubting is a thought process. The very act of doubting one’s existence proves that one actually exists; otherwise, who is doing the doubting?

Through his process of doubting, he recognized that, regardless of what the changeable physical world was really like, his mind was still whole and unchanged, and therefore somehow separate from that physical world.

For Descartes, mind has evident awareness of all its actions. This he calls the perfect transparency of the mind. A thought, for him, in the wide sense is defined as that of which I am immediately aware. He also analysed the content of his mind and discovered it contained certain innate ideas such as self, God, and substance.

Clear and Distinct Ideas

Descartes claimed that one cannot derive the idea of substance from observation precisely because perception can only generate qualities. Hence he had to posit the idea of substance as an innate idea. Such ideas are called innate because they have been implanted in us before our birth.

Moreover, clarity and distinctness are the marks of truth, the distinguishing characteristics by which we can tell the true from the false. Hence whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true. An experience or thought is clear and distinct if it is so forceful that we cannot avoid being aware of it.

As regards ideas that are not clear or distinct, we have no guarantee that what we believe is true. The faculty of judgement functions reliably in relation to the clear and distinct ideas that God has implanted in us. We make mistakes when we misuse our faculties. But we cannot make mistakes when we use them as God intends us to do.

The human mind can achieve systematic and certain knowledge by starting with knowing what is self-evident. God wanted us to direct our thoughts in an orderly manner, beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects and ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Descartes held that I can be absolutely certain only of me as a mental substance that thinks. I have a clear and distinct idea about it.

According to him, even in our sleep we can observe that it is because of our thinking that we exist. We may dismiss the many things that come into our mind as dreams or illusions, but one thing is sure and necessary is that I whom am thinking is something. Without my existence, I cannot think. Therefore, observing this truth, we can say: “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Descartes decided that he could accept this statement without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that he was seeking.

Descartes finally concluded that the proposition, I am/I exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. I am certain about this because I can clearly and distinctly see or understand what is being said.

Existence of God and World

One of the innate ideas we have is of a perfect being, God. We are merely finite, temporal creatures, and yet we have the idea of a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient and almighty. Descartes concluded that this idea can only be caused by something that possesses these perfections. Hence there must be a God who is perfect has implanted in me the idea of the perfect being. Now Descartes is certain of two truths: that he exists and God exists. He continued to search for further certainties and realized that if God is a perfect being, then He won’t deceive human beings because fraud and deception are imperfections and hence cannot be characteristics of a perfect being. If God is not a deceiver, then a great deal of the information that had earlier been considered suspect can now be considered reliable. All that is needed is to find out what God wants us to believe as true. Since he cannot deceive us we can place complete faith in the knowledge He gives us.

God has given us clear and distinct mathematical ideas like two plus two make four. Since God has forced this belief upon us, and since He cannot be a deceiver it must be true. We have divine guarantee here. “Every clear and distinct conception is certainly something, and therefore cannot come from nothing, but must necessarily come from God who is supremely perfect and cannot be the cause of any error.” Thus he concludes that the entire realm of mathematical knowledge is true.

But mathematical knowledge only gives me truths about concepts in my mind. Is it possible that I can also be certain that there is an external world? We cannot rely on their existence through our senses for they deceive us. However, in general it is quite clear and distinct to us and we have a strong inclination to believe that there is an external world of material bodies. Since the belief in the external world is a natural one, God would be deceiving us unless it is true. As God is not a deceiver there must be an external physical world. The properties that we can safely attribute it are the primary qualities which are clear and distinct; but we cannot know with certainty the indistinct or unclear features of the world, namely secondary qualities.

Critical Appraisal

Descartes’ picture of the world is hopelessly divided into substances that were defined in ways that mutually exclude each other. How could the mental world – a non-spatial, purely spiritual sphere – have any effect on the physical world of crass matter, and vice versa, in this radically dualistic scheme of things? He assigned all perceivable qualities to the mind and left only mathematically measurable quantities to the external world. Descartes replaced the commonsense view of the direct relation between self and the world with a most circuitous route of relating to the world through the mind.

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy, being love of wisdom, is a quest for fundamental and ultimate answers with regard to reality (God, the human person and the world). Its scope is everything, all reality. Philosophy is the result of a personal struggle to understand the mystery of human existence, the endeavour to unravel the secrets of nature, to make sense out of the complicated business of life. The first knowledge of the world gained in childhood and adolescence becomes inadequate as the years go by.

This sets out to a search that is unending, a search that is never satisfied until truth is claimed as our possession. We may never understand fully the riddle of existence, but we can always make an effort to discover, to understand, as much as our human faculties are capable of. And that is what distinguishes a human being from animals. That is why s/he is the crown of creation.

To philosophise is to explore life. It means breaking free to ask questions. It means resisting easy answers. To philosophise is to seek in oneself the courage to ask painful questions.

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties and consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body. The mind-body problem, namely, the question of how the mind relates to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind.

Philosophy of mind is specifically concerned with quite general questions about the nature of mental phenomena: for example, What is the nature of thought, feeling, perception, consciousness, and sensory experience?

Philosophy of mind also asks the following questions: Could a computer have a mind? What would it take to create a computer that could have a specific thought, emotion, or experience? Is Artifical Intelligence (AI) the same as human intelligence?

Mind

With the above in mind, let us ask ourselves what we mean by the term mind. We need to contrast it with other terms like matter, form, body, soul and consciousness.

Aristotle says that every physical object is a compound of matter and form. This doctrine is called “hylomorphism”. The terms form and matter describe a basic duality in all existence, between the essence or “whatness” of a thing (form) and the stuff that the thing is made of (matter). The set of soul and body is a special case of form and matter.

Soul is the principle of life in a living thing. It’s everything that makes you alive rather than dead. So if you look at a living body and compare it to a dead body, the difference is the soul. It’s a principle of organization, a principle of function. (Dead body means that body is dead… and soul is absent, though the soul is not dead. The dead body or cadaver is just a bunch of chemicals, waiting to decompose themselves sooner than later.)

And the spirit, in the Thomistic viewpoint, is the aspects of the soul that are not material. And that would be particularly the intellect, the rationality and the will. Loosely speaking, the soul is the principle of life in a body, and the spirit refers more to the immaterial aspects of the soul, which are the ability to understand, the ability to reason, and the ability to make decisions based on reason.

The ability to understand and the ability to reason are the mind. It is the knowing aspect in us. We experience, understand and judge things… this is the process of knowing. The spirit directed towards knowing is called the mind.

Mind is not the physical brain alone; though it has got some connection to the cerebral function. But mind in philosophy is the immaterial aspect of the soul, a dimension/part of the spirit, as directed towards knowing.

The mind colours everything that comes to us. We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. There is nothing called pure knowledge, or a pure mind. No mind is a tabula rasa. Our mind rather is an active agent that colours, shapes and interprets the world. It is not a passive receptor of its experience. The mind possesses innate powers.

According to Kant, the human mind does not passively receive sense data, but it actively structures them. A human person, therefore, knows objective reality to the extent that reality conforms to the fundamental structures of the mind. All human knowledge of the world is channelled through the mind’s own categories. The mind does not conform to objects; rather, objects conform to the mind.

We will also study dreams, emotions and feelings. They hinder or enhance the workings of the mind; they do colour our dealings with the world.

Consciousness

What is consciousness? Is it the same as mind? Consciousness is a self-presence that accompanies knowing, willing, loving and acting… a self-presence that accompanies every act, thought, reflection and will of the doer. Only when we are in deep sleep or in coma there is no consciousness. Even while we are dreaming, we are conscious, even if our consciousness is fragmentary. Though it is closely related to the mind, consciousness is not the same as mind.

Dreams

Dreams are the expression of our sub-conscious or unconscious mind while we are asleep. They are the royal road to unconscious. Our dreams bring things out of our unconscious. Many things come out: fear, loneliness, loss, repugnance, peace, satisfaction, happiness, emptiness, grandeur, narrow-mindedness, emotions, grief, guilt, etc.

The meaning of the dream is its function. A dream has various functions: digestion of food, digestion of other appetites, digestion of emotions, feelings. It has the effect of catharsis on us, and balances our mind and body. Whatever is unexpressed or suppressed or repressed during our conscious moments, may find expression in a dream.

Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Psychology

The philosophical questions need to be distinguished from purely empirical investigations, like experimental psychology. Empirical psychologists are, by and large, concerned with discovering contingent facts about people and animals. The difference between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind is a difference between their methods: empirical psychology will use an empirical method that is based on observation, experimentation and verification. Philosophy would us a generalized empirical method, involving human consciousness, where its focus would be ultimate and fundamental questions.

What is psychology? It is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context.

Sensations, for instance, seem essentially private and subjective, not open to the kind of public, objective inspection required of the subject matter of serious science. How would it be possible to find out what someone else’s private thoughts and feelings really are?

Could a computer have a mind? What would it take to create a computer that could have a specific thought, emotion, or experience?

Perhaps a computer could have a mind only if it were made up of the same kinds of neurons and chemicals of which human brains are composed. But this suggestion may seem crudely chauvinistic, rather like saying that a human being can have mental states only if his eyes are a certain colour. On the other hand, surely not just any computing device has a mind. Whether or not in the near future machines will be created that come close to being serious candidates for having mental states, focusing on this increasingly serious possibility is a good way to begin to understand the kinds of questions addressed in the philosophy of mind.