Topic 5 Mind - Coursera philosophy course PDF

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Topic 6: Descartes' Substance Dualism Theory of the Mind How human minds differ from animal minds: 1) We can evaluate our own thoughts. 2) We can think about things, even things that don’t currently exist. How do we capture the aboutness of our thoughts. 3) We have conscious awareness – What its likeness

Descartes theory of Substance dualism (or Cartesian dualism) Physical substances: Stuff that our bodies are made out of, stuff that trees are made out of, irons, metals, things in the world. Immaterial substances: Can’t be studied by science. It can’t be tracked by our best scientific instruments. It is immaterial substance that our minds are made of. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia’s problem (for substance dualism) of causation: 1) In order to move a physical thing they must be moved by another physical thing. 2) If thoughts are made out of a immaterial substance, then that substance isn't physical. 3) Given this, how can the immaterial mind then interact with the physical body so as to affect changes in the world? 4) If I think I know the answer to a question in a test, I'll put my hand up. What caused me to put my hand up? Well, it was my thought I knew the answer to that particular question. If I want to buy some chocolate, then I'll set off, and I'll get my coat, and I'll walk out the door and go to the shops. What caused that particular behavior? Well, it was my desire for chocolate. It was my particular thought. 5) So, thoughts, beliefs, and desires can cause particular behaviors. Behaviors happen in physical bodies. Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wanted to know how on earth an immaterial substance which was so fundamentally different from the physical stuff, how this immaterial stuff could cause a physical thing to move? *** Physicalism or materialism is the view that the mind is made up of matter like our bodies. This view has three sub-theories:  

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logical behaviourism: Identity theory: The theory that two organisms with identical features (down to even identical hormones) then those two organisms will be in exactly the same psychological state. The identify theory is also a reductionist view in that it;s reducing the psychological thoughts that we have, to the physical. There's Token Identity and Type Identity. Issue: An octopus might be in the same type of mental state as me, but in a very different type of brain state. Functionalism: Hillary Putnam says that this points to a more fundamental feature of psychological states. When you're thinking about psychological states, we should think about what they do and not what they're made of. This is the second view that we'll be looking at, and that's known as functionalism.

Putnam was pointing to was that, instead of thinking about what psychological states are made of, whether they're made of human brain stuff or alien brain stuff. We should be thinking about

what psychological states do. Different objects can look different and have completely different composition and yet still have the same function (Chairs, currencies from coins or shells). We should not be concerned with the physical composition of mental states but rather the functions of mental states. We can observe fear, love, depression etc by observation of behavioural or external traits rather than observation of the composition of those mental states. Psychological states are caused by sensory inputs which in turn cause behaviors. They could also in tern cause other internal states. So, I might have the belief that I'm hungry, that's a particular mental state that I have, and that causes me in turn to desire chocolate. So the desire for chocolate might cause me to put on my coat, go out to the shops. In contrast, my belief that there's chocolate in the fridge will cause a whole different set of behaviors in psychological states. Might cause me to get up and go to the fridge, it might cause me to answer, yes, if someone says to me, hey, is there any chocolate in the fridge? And this is the point that Putnam is trying to drive at. He's saying that we should understand psychological states not by what they're made of, but how they function. The types of behaviors and psychological states that they cause and the types of sensory inputs, and perceptions, and psychological states, which cause them. Functionalism conclusion: functionalism is about abstracting away from what psychological states are made from and looking at what they do. And functionalism answers the question of what it is to have a mind, by saying that what it is to have a mind is to have a certain level of functional complexity, to have a certain level of psychological states that function in very complex ways dependent on perceptions of the environment. And the more complex, once we've reached the level of complexity of a human, then we have a mind.

Alan Turing (1950;s) machines as human minds Turing test: Respond to questions in such a way that one cannot distinguish between it and a human being. A machine is behind a screen and responds to question. If it answers questions as a human would and we can’t tell it’s a human based on its ‘Function’. Then it is functionally a human and as such would we deem it has a mind? Issue with the turing test: Focused on the final product and not the inner works (the process) John Searle (The chinese test): If you use a rule book to take Chinese questions and write Chinese responses as instructed by books. If you correctly respond but have no idea of what is being said then you will give the perception of understanding which is false. You will be perceived as a Chinese native which is false. That is what happens when a computer responds in a human like manner – it is performing algorithms but not thinking and has no understanding. Machines do not understand the semantic meanings of words but is just following procedures.

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The syntactic properties of a symbol pertain to its form The semantic properties of a symbol pertain to its meaning or content.

Searle’s conclusion: Searle's point. He says, that a system, no matter how functionally complex it is, even if they can pass something like the Turing test that only other works on the syntactic properties, the symbols, the shapes that they get, will never be a proper thinking system because it will never have the aboutness. It will never be able to understand the semantic value of those symbols. And intuitively, in order to have a thinking system, you have to have a system that understands the semantic properties of symbols as well as the syntactic ones. That's how we get the aboutness of thoughts.

Issue with functionalism arisen from the turning test and Chinese test thought experiments: Although we can give a functional analysis of how psychological states work, philosophers have argued that this won't get us any closer to the question of what it's like to be in particular states. So although we can give an analysis in terms of inputs and outputs, we haven't really gotten any closer to the question of analyzing the awareness or the sense of experience that we have. Providing a functional analysis of something doesn't explain why it has conscious experience.

Topic 7 Philosophy of science Saving the phenomena: is about providing a good, accurate analysis of the data generated by scientific observations and experiments. This is also known as "saving the appearances": providing a good analysis of scientific phenomena as they appear to us, without any commitment to the truth of what brings about those phenomena or appearances.

Scientific realists maintain that the entities postulated by scientific theories (electrons, genes, quasars) are real entities in the world, with approximately the properties attributed to them by the best available scientific theories. Mario Bunge (1993) argues strongly that scientific realism is most suited to an appropriate methodology for the social sciences. Scientific instrumentalists, on the other hand, maintain that theories are no more than instruments of calculation, permitting the scientist to infer from one set of observable circumstances to another set of observable circumstances at some later point in time According to Duhem, ancient Greek astronomers were concerned with the APPARENT celestial motion of the planets - that is, they were concerned with the motion of the planets as it appeared to them. This is not necessarily the same thing as the celestial motion of the planets. Moreover according to Duhem, the ancient Greek astronomers held that their hypotheses could explain this apparent motion but did not believe that their hypotheses were true descriptions. This is an example of saving the appearances, or saving the phenomena. Galileo defended what Pierre Duhem calls the method of the physicist against the method of the astronomers. He was the first one that had dared to say that the aim of science is not to save the phenomena, but to provide us with a true story about the phenomena. Argument for scientific realism: No Miracles Argument: It would be a miracle if the outcomes produced by scientific models come true by coincidence rather than because our models were actually correct. Unless we believe that scientific theories are at least approximately true, this success would be unlikely in the extreme - scientific success would be a miracle. The more likely outcome must be logicially accepted that scientific realism is true. Constructive empiricism: American philosopher Bas van Fraassen 1980s. Agrees with scientific realist with the semantic aspects about what the words used means but they disagree with the epistemic aspect. The ‘empiricism ‘emphasizes that our knowledge should be confined to the available experimental evidence, as opposed to going beyond the available evidence and claiming to discover truth about the unobservable. They see the aim as not truth but empirical adequacy,

Unobservable: We shouldn't take models as providing the truth about the unobservable, namely about atoms, molecules, or chemical arrangements. Models must only be adequate to the observable phenomena. They are useful tools to get calculations done, but they don't deliver any truth about the unobservable entities. The aim of science to a constructive empiricist is not truth but is more practically orientated with the goal of performing calculations and making predictions. So constructive empiricism would insist that scientific theories not to be true in order to be good, they only need to be empirically adequate. And a theory is empirically adequate if whatever the theory says about observable things and events in the world (past, present, and future) is true. Argument for scientific non-relialism Counter to the no miracles argument: The success of our present theories is the result of a struggle for survival across centuries. So, the best theories in mature science are the ones that have proved survival adaptive, are the ones that have proved to save the available evidence without necessarily being true. So in reply to the argument, the constructive empiricists would insist that we can give an explanation, some sort of Darwinian explanation, of why scientists are successful by appealing to empirical adequacy rather than truth. Comparison: Scientific realism is more metaphysically committed than constructive empiricism. This, says the constructive empiricist, is risky. Scientific theories are continually being replaced by new theories, so unobserved entities figuring in today's successful scientific theories - for example, neutrinos - might turn out to be non-existent according to future scientific theories. This would make scientific realism false, but not constructive empiricism. The constructive empiricist takes not having this metaphysical commitment to the existence of unobserved entities to be a theoretical advantage for her view.Why should we trust the naked eye more than our scientific intruments (Electron microscope).

The Inference to the Best Explanation argument puts pressure on constructive empiricism by calling into question the constructive empiricist's characterisation of the observed/unobserved distinction. The IBE argument claims that we have good reasons for believing in the existence of some unobserved observables (such as dinosaurs), and that we have the same type of reasons for believing in the existence of some unobservables (such as Higgs bosons). The scientific realist claims that since these reasons are good in the case of unobserved observables, so they are just as good in the case of unobservables. We don't rely necessarily on our eyes or technological instruments to believe in the unobservable entities but on the validity and robustness of our inferential practices informed by a wealth of experimental data in order to draw conclusions about how our universe is going to be like....