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May 30 - June 1, 2025
Many questions that philosophers of mind address overlap with questions scientists investigate. Philosophers want to understand the nature of consciousness; neuroscientists and psychologists do too. Philosophers want to decipher the relationship between language and thought; linguists do as well. Philosophers study rational decision-making, as do economists, and attempt to discern the ultimate constituents of reality, which is also the domain of physics. Yet, despite being one of the branches of the interdisciplinary study of the mind called ‘cognitive science’, philosophy of mind is typically
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Subtlety in literature is a virtue, whereas the arguments in philosophy of mind, rather fittingly, typically aim to hit you over the head.
The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal commented in a 1657 letter that he would have written less, had he had time to do so. I thank Oxford University Press for their patience.
I love that Pascal story. I have a similar writing style. It takes time to edit down my thoughts into a manageable length.
Chapter 1 Dualism
Dualism in philosophy of mind is the theory that the mind is distinct from the body;
it is the theory that philosophy of mind cut its teeth on, and, though widely criticized, it continues to command the attention of contemporary philosophers who puzzle over thought experiments that seem to suggest the theory is true.
The Mary thought experiment
The mind‒body problem
Biology depicts human beings as aggregations of 37.2 trillion cells working together to form the tissues and organs that keep us ticking.
The mind, from a biological perspective, is nothing more than the working brain, or, more specifically, in contrast to the
parts of the brain that control digestion, respiration, and other autonomic processes, it is nothing other than the parts of the working brain that beget thinking, feeling, emoting, and the like.
If we can introspect our minds but not our brains, the mind, it would seem, is not a component of the brain.
Dualism in ancient times
As a philosophical theory, it goes back at least to Plato, who, writing in Greece in the 4th century bce, saw human beings as composed of a material body and an immaterial mind, or what he thought of as a body and a soul.
Dualism’s history can also be traced through religious texts. The Buddhist text, the Visuddhimagga, written in the 5th century ce in Sri Lanka, presents a version of dualism in which the soul and body are interdependent.
The 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein held that philosophy is iatrogenic: it aims merely to cure illnesses that it itself has created, merely ‘to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’.
Cartesian dualism
the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who is seen, as the founder of modern philosophy. While contemporary philosophy is sometimes described as a series of footnotes to Plato, contemporary philosophy of mind might be better described as a footnote to Descartes.
Descartes upheld a form of dualism that has come to be known as ‘Cartesian dualism’, or ‘interactive dualism’, according to which mind and body are distinct (that’s the dualism part) yet causally interact with each other (that’s the interactive part).
Descartes argues that because it is possible for mind and body to exist on their own, mind and body actually are distinct.
of the equation and advocating ‘idealism’, a theory according to which the entire material world is merely a construct of the mind.
Why only two?
The zombie argument
Questioning conceivability arguments
Chapter 2 Behaviourism
The category mistake
Our actions are analogous to the buildings and grounds of a university while the mind is analogous to the university itself, and the dualist’s ‘big mistake’ is thinking of mind and body as two things that fall under the heading ‘parts of a person’.
According to the behaviourist, there is nothing behind the scenes. What you think is what you do.
Varieties of behaviourism
Other minds and causation
The philosophical theory of behaviourism is motivated, in part, by the desire to avoid what is referred to as ‘the problem of other minds’, which is the problem of specifying how you can know that anyone other than yourself has a mind.
Super-spartans
Dispositions
A compromise view
Chapter 3 Physicalism
It took around 380,000 years before the first atoms were formed.
around the 9.2-billion-year mark, the solar system was formed. Life on earth is thought to have begun within a billion years after that, perhaps arising in undersea alkaline vents,
approximately 4 million years ago—humans began to evolve along the verdant savannas of east Africa.
Where in this picture does the mind make its appearance?
The physicalist thinks that, although our knowledge of the creation and evolution of the universe is incomplete, we know enough to know that God isn’t working behind the scenes. Everything that exists today—including human minds—came about, according to the physicalist, in virtue of the rearrangements of and interactions between the physical particles and forces that emerged after the universe’s birth.
From behaviourism to the identity theory Physicalism is a theory about the general nature of the world; it asserts that everything—from particles to people, from multi-star systems to multiplayer video games—is physical. And since the mind is seen as physicalism’s greatest nemesis, the central challenge for physicalists is to show how the mind sits comfortably in the physical world.
Multiple realization
Functionalism
The key idea of functionalism—and a common denominator of both these accounts—is that pain is at the centre of a causal network.
person causing you pain. In other words, pain, according to the functionalist, is whatever satisfies a certain story, or ‘causal role’. While the identity theory says that pain is the neural realization of this role in humans, functionalism leaves the realization open: pain is whatever fits the story.
Chauvinism and liberalism
Mysterianism and eliminativism
The world is entirely physical, says the eliminativist, yet there is no need to figure out how the mind fits into the physical world since the mind does not exist.
neuroscientific accounts of brain processes have already in some cases replaced explanations of our actions in terms of free will.
The causal argument for physicalism
