Mind and Consciousness Debate Guide

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Mind and Brain

Mind refers to the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness which are manifest in some combination of thought, perception, emotion, will and imagination.

There are many theories of what the mind is and how it works, dating back to Plato, Aristotle and other Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers. Pre-scientific theories, which were rooted in theology, concentrated on the relationship between the mind and the soul, the supposed supernatural or divine essence of the human person.

The question of which human attributes make up the mind is also much debated. Some argue that only the "higher" intellectual functions constitute mind: particularly reason and memory. In this view the emotions - love, hate, fear, joy - are more "primitive" or subjective in nature and should be seen as different in nature or origin to the mind. Others argue that the rational and the emotional sides of the human person cannot be separated, that they are of the same nature and origin, and that they should all be considered as part of the individual mind.

Mind from Wikipedia  

A distinction is often made in the philosophy of mind between the mind and the brain, and there is some controversy as to their exact relationship, leading to the mind-body problem. The brain is defined as the physical and biological matter contained within the skull, responsible for all electrochemical neuronal processes. The mind, however, is seen in terms of mental attributes, such as beliefs or desires. Some believe that the mind exists in some way independently of the brain, such as in a soul or epiphenomenon. Others, such as strong AI theorists, say that the mind is directly analogous to computer software and the brain to hardware.

Brain from Wikipedia  

Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

Consciousness from Wikipedia  

Physicalism (or materialism) asserts that the mind is solely a material and physical phenomenon. Physicalists hold the position that all aspects of the mind are the direct result of brain activity. Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, Paul and Patricia Churchland, as well as the majority of philosophers of the mind today, take this position.

Anti-physicalism is a blanket term which can include a variety of philosophical theories. These philosophers take the postion that there are aspects of the mind (usually related to personal subjective experience) which are not reducible to physical (brain) processes alone.

  • Do you agree with these definitions?
  • What are other ways to describe the concept of the mind and the feeling of consciousness?
  • Is the mind a physical thing?
  • If we study the neurology of the mind have we exhausted the subject? Scientists can manipulate responses through electrical impulses and almost 'read thoughts' through brain scans. Is there anything left?
  • What happens to the mind when someone dies? How does this relate to the concept of the soul?
  • Swiss researchers can trigger the start/stop of classic out-of-body experiences through electrical impulses. What are the implications of this?
  • Is it possible to one day create a computer as smart as the human brain? Or is there something unique about the brain?
  • The brain is wired for mimicry in intelligent species. This helps the young learn quickly. Is this something missing from computers?
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Consciousness

There is not just one problem of consciousness. "Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

  • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
  • the integration of information by a cognitive system;
  • the reportability of mental states;
  • the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
  • the focus of attention;
  • the deliberate control of behavior;
  • the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms... If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness from Journal of Consciousness Studies  

  • How do you find consciousness? Are all thoughts and emotions included? What about unconscious mental processes?
  • Is it possible that consciousness evolved for a reason? What reason(s) could it serve?
  • What do recent discoveries about the preponderance of unconscious mental activities even in "conscious" choices imply for the discussion of free will?
  • Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?
  • How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?
  • Some coma patients, unresponsive to the outside world, exhibit appropriate reactionary neural impulses to certain phrases and suggestions. What would that existence be like? A fog, or clear-mindedness? A living torture?

To understand consciousness, scientists examine its many altered states.

  • What do altered states of consciousness (dreams, hypnosis, lucid dreaming, etc...) tell us about the mind?
  • What do mind-altering drugs (LSD, etc.) tell us about the mind?
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Thought Experiments

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The Turing Test for Intelligence

This famous test can be stated simply in today's world thus: you are on the Internet in a chat room.

  • If there were a computer sufficiently well-programmed on the other side, how could you tell whether you were chatting with a human or a machine?
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The Chinese Room

John Searle is very well known for his development of a thought experiment, called the "Chinese room" argument. He set out to prove that human thought was not simply computation. His main premise is that a computational process in itself cannot have an "understanding" of events and processes. Simply put, Searle tried to show how computers do not have to understand things like a language to process information. There has been a great deal of controversy over the examples he uses to demonstrate this.

[1] from [2]  

Searle describes a scenario in which a person is isolated in a room. The individual receives pieces of paper marked with Chinese characters from under the door. The human in the Chinese Room follows an English manual for identifying certain Chinese characters and writing out other Chinese characters. The manual is not a Chinese/English dictionary. When done, the 'output' is slipped back under the door to the outside world.

  • If the incoming Chinese symbols contained a short story and questions about the short story, and the English manual described how to write correct answers to the short story through the reading and writing of identified Chinese symbols, then the human can answer the questions about the story. Did the human understand the story?
  • Even more to the point, does the human understand Chinese? (No.)
  • If a human can run through a Chinese algorithm and not understand Chinese, then how could a machine run through an algorithm and experience consciousness?
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The Zombie Problem

The Hard Problem is sometimes debated through a discussion of "philosophical zombies." A philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience or qualia or sentience. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain. It behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "Ouch!" and so forth), but it does not actually have the experience of pain as a person normally does.

The notion of a philosophical zombie is mainly used in arguments (often called zombie arguments) in the philosophy of mind, particularly arguments against forms of physicalism.

[3] from [4]  

  • Is Lt. Commander Data considered alive? What does he experience?
  • Is consciousness an illusion? Is it merely a form of computation? Can it be created artificially?
  • Is it possible that all human beings are really zombies? How would you know?
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The "Planet of the Apes" Scenario

  • Are animals conscious?
  • Should an ape that is more sentient, aware, and communicative than a human (say, in the future, or today, with a mentally-disabled person) be granted equal rights as Man?
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Mary's Room (Advanced)

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

[5] from [6]  


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Philosophers of Consciousness

Listed below are some of the influential contemporary thinkers in the field of consciousness studies. Note the differences in their conclusions concerning the ultimate nature of consciousness.

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Ned Block

In his more recent work on consciousness, he made a distinction between two types of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness, and access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is a matter of subjective experience and feelings. Access consciousness is a matter of information being globally available in the cognitive system for the purposes of reasoning, speech and high-level action control. Block has argued that access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness might not always coincide in human beings.

[7] from [8]  

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David Chalmers

He is best known for his support for the notion of the hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). He makes the distinction between easy problems of consciousness (which are, amongst others, things like finding neural correlates of sensation) and the hard problem, which could be stated "why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?" A main focus of his study is the distinction between brain biology and behavior as distinct from mental experience taken as independent of behavior (known as qualia). He argues that there is an explanatory gap between these two systems, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist in an era that some have seen as being dominated by monist views.

[9] from [10]  

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Donald Davidson

[Davidson's] work in the 1980s dealt with the problem [of] relating first-person beliefs to second- and third-person beliefs. It seems that first person beliefs ("I am hungry") are acquired in very different ways from third person beliefs (someone else's belief, of me, that "He is hungry") How can it be that they have the same content?

Davidson approached this question by connecting it with another one: how can two people have beliefs about the same external object? He offers, in answer, a picture of triangulation: Beliefs about oneself, beliefs about other people, and beliefs about the world come into existence jointly.

Many philosophers throughout history had, arguably, been tempted to reduce two of these kinds of belief and knowledge to the other one: Descartes and Hume thought that the only knowledge we start with is self-knowledge. Some of the logical positivists, (and some would say Wittgenstein, or Wilfrid Sellars), held that we start with beliefs only about the external world. (And arguably Friedrich Schelling and Emmanuel Levinas held that we start with beliefs only about other people). It is not possible, on Davidson's view, for a person to have only one of these three kinds of mental content; anyone who has beliefs of one of the kinds must have beliefs of the other two kinds.

[11] from [12]  

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Daniel Dennett

Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind which is grounded in and fruitful to empirical research. In his original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The Intentional Stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views, and he frequently refers back to them in subsequent writings.

While it is clear that Dennett does not subscribe to a number of categories (such as Cartesian materialism and Dualism), it is less clear which ones he fits into. As Dennett discussed:

[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless--a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors

Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium

Dennett will self-identify with a few terms. In Consciousness Explained, he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as a sort of verificationalist". In Breaking the Spell he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term on several occasions.

[13] from [14]  

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Frank Jackson

In philosophy of mind, Jackson is known, among other things, for the knowledge argument against physicalism—the view that the universe is entirely physical (i.e., the kinds of entities postulated in physics). Jackson motivates the knowledge argument by a thought experiment known as Mary's room. [See entry below: Mary's Room"]

[15] from [16]  

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Thomas Nagel

In "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" [See full text of article in Background Reading], Nagel argues that consciousness has essential to it a subjective character, a what it is like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."[3] Nagel also alludes to the idea that the subjective aspect of the mind cannot ever be sufficiently accounted for by the objective methods of reductionistic science. He claims that "[i]f we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done."[4] Furthermore, he states that "it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective."[5]

[17] from [18]  

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Roger Penrose

Penrose has written controversial books on the connection between fundamental physics and human consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. Penrose hints at the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he terms correct quantum gravity, CQG). He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the human mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer -- this is in contrast to views, e.g., Biological Naturalism, that human behavior but not consciousness might be simulated. This is based on claims that human consciousness transcends formal logic systems because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem restrict an algorithmically based logic from traits such as mathematical insight. These claims were originally made by the philosopher John Lucas of Merton College, Oxford.

[19] from [20]  

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John Searle

John Searle is very well known for his development of a thought experiment, called the "Chinese room" argument. He set out to prove that human thought was not simply computation. His main premise is that a computational process in itself cannot have an "understanding" of events and processes. Simply put, Searle tried to show how computers do not have to understand things like a language to process information. There has been a great deal of controversy over the examples he uses to demonstrate this. In his theory, Searle describes a scenario in which a person is isolated in a room. The individual receives pieces of paper marked with Chinese characters from under the door. Even though the person does not understand Chinese, if there is a formal sorting process for the characters then they can be filed into a meaningful order. The room is supposed to be an analogy for the computer. Those who argue the point say that the analogy should hold for the entire brain. They maintain that "a person's understanding of Chinese is an emergent property of the brain and not a property possessed by any one part

[21] from [22]  

  • Take a brief look at differences in the philosophies of the mind. What are the major points of difference between Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, for instance. With which views of the mind are you most in agreement? Why?
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Philosophies

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Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind

In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.[1]

The first manifestations of mind/body dualism probably go back to the origins of conscious thought, when people began to speculate about the existence of an incorporeal soul which bore the faculties of intelligence and wisdom. We first encounter similar ideas in Western philosophy with the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who maintained, for different reasons, that man's "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[

[23] from [24]  

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New Mysterianism

Owen Flanagan noted in his 1991 book Science of the Mind that some modern thinkers have suggested that consciousness might never be completely explained. Flanagan called them "the new mysterians" after the rock group ? and the Mysterians. The term originated with the Japanese alien-invasion film The Mysterians. The "old mysterians" are thinkers throughout history who have put forward a similar position. They include Leibniz, Dr. Johnson, and Thomas Huxley. Huxley wrote, "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." [6, p. 229, quote]

[25] from Wikipedia  

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Physicalism

Physicalism is the metaphysical position (associated particularly with Quine) that everything is physical; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. Likewise, physicalism about the mental is a position in philosophy of mind which holds that the mind is a physical thing in some sense. This position is also called "materialism", but the term "physicalism" is preferable because it does not have any misleading ethical connotations, and because it carries an emphasis on the physical, meaning whatever is described ultimately by physics -- not just matter but energy and whatever else physical theories might talk about. Some proposed examples might be space, time, physical forces, structure, physical processes, information, state, et al.

[26] from [27]  

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Monism

Monism is the metaphysical and theological view that all is of one essence, principle, substance or energy and that there is one, universal, unified set of laws underlying nature. Monism is to be distinguished from dualism, which holds that ultimately there are two kinds of substance, and from pluralism, which holds that ultimately there are many kinds of substance.

[28] from [29]  

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Idealism

Idealism is a class of positions in ontology and epistemology. Idealism as an epistemological position asserts that everything we experience is of a mental nature. That is, we can only have direct, immediate knowledge of the contents of our mind. We can never directly know or experience an external object itself. As an ontological position Idealism asserts either that only minds and the objects of mind exist, or that everything is composed of mental realities (e.g., thoughts, feelings, perceptions, ideas, or will). As a foundation for cosmology, or an approach to understanding the nature of existence, idealism is often contrasted with materialism, both belonging to the class of monist as opposed to dualist or pluralist ontologies.

[30] from [31]  

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Background Reading

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Books

  • Blackmore, Susan, "Conversations on Consciousness," (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press), 2005. This a good high-level introduction to consciousness. Nature magazine said of it: "The intellectual analogue of... speed dating."
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Sites

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Articles

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