Intro - Meet Your Mind PDF

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introductory lecture for the course...

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Meet Your Mind Mind is all that we are? o With mind, we can:  Do  think and perceive, feel, learn, make decisions, create, imagine  Have  believes, emotions, values, memories, reason Thought and experience: - Can sense things (see, smell, hear, etc.) - Have ideas or doubts or judgements o Are all thoughts different experiences or experiences thoughts? o Conscious vs. unconscious Qualia: - Special mental states when we experience things: “What it is like” o Seeing red and describing the difference between that and seeing green Sensory Perception: - What’s the difference between actually physically seeing a cat vs. thinking about one? o Direct causal interaction between object perceived and perceiver?  Things perceived do not actually have to be real, it can be imagined (ie. Unicorns) so what is the relationship? - Empiricism: sensory perception is the source of all knowledge and ideas o Nothing goes to our mind without first passing through the senses Emotion: - Interesting because there’s more to feelings than merely negative or positive ones in addition to our “neutral thoughts” Imagery: - Can imagine visuals or smells or sounds - Are images created in our mind because of our thoughts and/or experience? Will and action: - What happens to us (thoughts and experiences) vs. what we actually do (will and action) - Our wills and actions are decisions that we make, not that happenings merely occur Self: - Self makes us a somebody instead of a nobody…. o Mind is what sets us apart from being a mere object? o Is our mind our self?  Hume believed that since “we are able to attend to our experiences and trying to look inward, we only find what is glimpsed but never catch a glimpse of any entity doing the glimpsing ∴ the self is nothing at all”  We cannot step outside of ourselves and have a third person’s POV Propositional attitudes: - A mental state or trait (attitude) is being declared (the proposition or whatever is proposed)

PROBLEMS Mind-body: - What is the relationship between the mind and body? The mental and physical? o What’s the difference? o How can they interact with such synchronization if they are different? If they’re the same, why are they so different? - Substance Dualism (Descartes): Minds  thinking things, no space taken up; Physical things  unthinking things that take up space o Problem of interaction if they are so radically different  Objections of this view: if they are so different and one seems to cause the other to do something, it means that both have to be present at the same time  Causation implies proximity, but since minds do not take up space, they are essentially nowhere

Perception: - Can be a direct causal interaction between the perceived and perceiver - Can also be an idea that is hallucinated o Does the real world matter? Irrelevant? Other Minds: - How do we tell whether someone has a mind? o Problematic because someone can exhibit certain behaviours outwardly, but inwardly they do not actually feel the particular emotion that relates to the behaviours  How do we know someone isn’t acting? Artificial Intelligence: - Can machines think? What does it mean to think?  Language of thought: ability to put symbols into different thoughts based on different rules  Is it ever possible to put a mind in a machine? o Functionalism: the idea that humans are a machine and our brain is our computer Consciousness: - Explanatory gap: the idea that studying the physical will not be enough to explain mental processes

Intentionality: - Relationship between the thing in thought and the thinking thing

Free Will? Personal Identity: - How much can one thing change until it becomes a new or second thing that is different from the first? o Has the thing changed, or has it become a different thing?  Ie. A chair vs. the ashes after burning it  is it still a chair?...