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.