Lecture 1: The mind-body problem and dualism
Socrates (469-399 BC) walked around in the village and asked questions.
1. What is …?
2. What do you mean by that exactly?
3. What arguments can you give for that idea?
4. Is that really true though?
The mind body problem =
What is the relationship between the mind and the body?
What is the relationship between
a) the mental realm (the realm of thoughts, sensations, emotions)
b) the physical realm (the realm of furniture, bodies, neurons, atoms)
The mental and physical realm are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other
Substance dualism is the first theoretical framework that tries to answer this problem
Substance dualism =
The mind and body are different things. The mind is not reducible to the brain. The body
decays after death but the mind lives on in the after life (immaterial vs material substance)
→ René Descartes
- Mind: res cogitans, a thinking thing
Body: res extensa, and extended thing
- He came up with radical doubt: “I doubt, therefore I am - or what is the same - I think,
therefore I am”. You cannot doubt that you are thinking because doubting is thinking.
- The world we live in can be one big illusion. This specific form of substance dualism
is also called “Cartesian Dualism”.
What arguments can Descartes give for that idea (Socrates’ question) =
- X = Y, only when X and Y share all properties
- Premise 1 = I can doubt the existence of my body
- Premise 2 = I cannot doubt the existence of my thinking
- Conclusion = Therefore, my body and my thinking cannot be the same thing
Princess Elisabeth’s objection (Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia 1616-1680) =
The interaction problem:
How can an immaterial substance act on a material substance?
- If the mind is immaterial, it cannot come into direct physical contact with the body
- How then, can there be any direct (causal) relations between the two?
- How can my mind bring it about that my finger moves?
Analogy: the morning star and the evening star
, - The morning star and the evening star refer to the same object → the planet
Venus, seen at different times of the day
- Any difference between them, results from human perception, not from them being
two separate objects
A counter argument against substance dualism =
1. Descartes: the mind (immaterial) and body (material) are distinct substances
2. Elizabeth of Bohemia was not convinced:
- If Descartes was right, then how could mind and body interact?
- It is unimaginable that an immaterial substance (the mind) could influence
physical material (the body)
3. Just as the morning star and the evening star are one and the same object, the mind
and the body might not be fundamentally distinct, as Descartes suggests, but two
interconnected aspects of the same system.
Ontology vs epistemology
Descartes error can be traced to a conflation of two distinct types of questions:
1. ontological questions: what really exists?
- Is there a mind? Is there a body?
- Is the mind distinct from the body and vice versa?(Whether we doubt it or not)
2. epistemological questions: what can we know and how can we know it?
- Can we doubt the existence of our body?
- Can we doubt the existence of our mind?
Later philosophers found Descartes’ argument from doubt for substance dualism to be
flawed. Why?
What you think or believe about a thing is not a property of that thing: this includes doubting
that thing.
Summary of substance dualism (soul vs body)
1. What is the mind and the body?
The mind and the body are two different things (substance dualism)
2. What do you mean by that exactly?
The mind is a thinking substance, the body is an extended substance (Cartesian
Dualism)
3. What arguments can you give for that idea?
We can doubt the existence of our bodies (premise 1), but not the existence of our
doubting (premise 2), so our doubting/thinking and our bodies cannot be the same
(conclusion).
4. Is that really true though?
No, the conclusion does not follow from the premises (by analogy)
,Property dualism (brain vs body) =
The second form of dualism → The mental and physical are different properties of
physical things (brain-body dualism). There is just one kind of thing, but there are two
kinds of properties.
1. Mental properties = sadness, being curious
2. Physical properties = being tall or heavy
- some mental properties cannot be reduces to physical properties (unlike water, which
can be reduced to H20 but with the mind this is not possible)
- access vs phenomenal consciousness; hard problem of consciousness and Mary's
room argument
Access consciousness =
An access-conscious state is a state directly available to you to drive your actions, speech,
and thoughts.
- accessible from 3rd person point of view
- it’s non-trivial: you cannot report how to ride a bike even if you have access to this
knowledge (but you can perform the action)
Knowing facts —> working memory, information storage in the brain —> third person
perspective —> reflective/thinking;
thinking about riding a bike —> connected to verbal reports
Phenomenal consciousness (qualia) ‘what it is like’ =
- the subjective feel or ‘what it is like’ to be in a particular state
- it is associated with a specific qualitative experience character
- is well-identifiable, temporally bound
- only accessible from the 1st person point of view
Experiences —> first person perspective.
What it is like, subjective experiences —> what a colour looks like —> automatic; riding a
bike
Once you give words (access) to a personal experience (phenomenal), the experience
changes. If you tell a client that the behaviour of their parents was not normal but abusive, the
experience changes.
Property dualism & consciousness
1. Property dualists: consciousness cannot be fully explained by physical laws.
2. What does this mean exactly?
They think that objective physical processes (including brain-facts) cannot explain
subjective experiences (the ‘what it is like’ or ‘qualia’)
Mary’s room =
, Mary is in a completely black and white room that has scientific knowledge about colours.
All the knowledge there is about colours. Will she learn new information when she leaves the
room and sees color for the first time?
- Intuitive answer: yes
- while in the room, mary does not know somethings about seeing red: what it is like to
see red (phenomenal consciousness)
- since Mary knew all the physical facts about color vision before her escape, what she
learns afterwards must be nonphysical
Substance versus property dualism and science
1. Property dualism is sometimes held to be more compatible with science than
substance dualism
2. Why think so? Arguments?
- non physical things (e.g., souls) are harder for science to accommodate
- non physical properties (e.g. consciousness) are easier
Is there an appropriate scientific method to investigate consciousness?
1. Introspection
- What about asking subjects to report their experience? (E.g. Wilhelm Wundt)
- ‘Every observation must, in order to make certain, be capable of being
repeated several times under the same conditions’
- Problem: it is unreliable. The reports cannot be independently observed and
tested by others
2. Neuroscience
- Is it better to directly study the brain?
- Say you observe 35-73 Hertz oscillations in the cerebral cortex. Why is it
these oscillations rather than others that produce conscious experience?
- How does the ‘what it is like’ to see a rainbow, to taste a strawberry, etc.
emerge from such brain activity? How can we explain this?
Predicate dualism =
Terms in our language → The mind and the body are different terms in our language so
they have different meanings
Hard problem =
To explain subjective experience (what it is like). Phenomenal problem because there is no
measurement unit you can measure experiences in, you cannot measure a 1st person
perspective. It is not enough to describe how the brain processes information: we need to
explain why this processing leads to conscious experience. No matter how much data about
echolocation or brain activity we collect, this will not allow us to understand the bat’s or
Mary’s first-person experience.
Summary property dualism
Socrates (469-399 BC) walked around in the village and asked questions.
1. What is …?
2. What do you mean by that exactly?
3. What arguments can you give for that idea?
4. Is that really true though?
The mind body problem =
What is the relationship between the mind and the body?
What is the relationship between
a) the mental realm (the realm of thoughts, sensations, emotions)
b) the physical realm (the realm of furniture, bodies, neurons, atoms)
The mental and physical realm are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other
Substance dualism is the first theoretical framework that tries to answer this problem
Substance dualism =
The mind and body are different things. The mind is not reducible to the brain. The body
decays after death but the mind lives on in the after life (immaterial vs material substance)
→ René Descartes
- Mind: res cogitans, a thinking thing
Body: res extensa, and extended thing
- He came up with radical doubt: “I doubt, therefore I am - or what is the same - I think,
therefore I am”. You cannot doubt that you are thinking because doubting is thinking.
- The world we live in can be one big illusion. This specific form of substance dualism
is also called “Cartesian Dualism”.
What arguments can Descartes give for that idea (Socrates’ question) =
- X = Y, only when X and Y share all properties
- Premise 1 = I can doubt the existence of my body
- Premise 2 = I cannot doubt the existence of my thinking
- Conclusion = Therefore, my body and my thinking cannot be the same thing
Princess Elisabeth’s objection (Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia 1616-1680) =
The interaction problem:
How can an immaterial substance act on a material substance?
- If the mind is immaterial, it cannot come into direct physical contact with the body
- How then, can there be any direct (causal) relations between the two?
- How can my mind bring it about that my finger moves?
Analogy: the morning star and the evening star
, - The morning star and the evening star refer to the same object → the planet
Venus, seen at different times of the day
- Any difference between them, results from human perception, not from them being
two separate objects
A counter argument against substance dualism =
1. Descartes: the mind (immaterial) and body (material) are distinct substances
2. Elizabeth of Bohemia was not convinced:
- If Descartes was right, then how could mind and body interact?
- It is unimaginable that an immaterial substance (the mind) could influence
physical material (the body)
3. Just as the morning star and the evening star are one and the same object, the mind
and the body might not be fundamentally distinct, as Descartes suggests, but two
interconnected aspects of the same system.
Ontology vs epistemology
Descartes error can be traced to a conflation of two distinct types of questions:
1. ontological questions: what really exists?
- Is there a mind? Is there a body?
- Is the mind distinct from the body and vice versa?(Whether we doubt it or not)
2. epistemological questions: what can we know and how can we know it?
- Can we doubt the existence of our body?
- Can we doubt the existence of our mind?
Later philosophers found Descartes’ argument from doubt for substance dualism to be
flawed. Why?
What you think or believe about a thing is not a property of that thing: this includes doubting
that thing.
Summary of substance dualism (soul vs body)
1. What is the mind and the body?
The mind and the body are two different things (substance dualism)
2. What do you mean by that exactly?
The mind is a thinking substance, the body is an extended substance (Cartesian
Dualism)
3. What arguments can you give for that idea?
We can doubt the existence of our bodies (premise 1), but not the existence of our
doubting (premise 2), so our doubting/thinking and our bodies cannot be the same
(conclusion).
4. Is that really true though?
No, the conclusion does not follow from the premises (by analogy)
,Property dualism (brain vs body) =
The second form of dualism → The mental and physical are different properties of
physical things (brain-body dualism). There is just one kind of thing, but there are two
kinds of properties.
1. Mental properties = sadness, being curious
2. Physical properties = being tall or heavy
- some mental properties cannot be reduces to physical properties (unlike water, which
can be reduced to H20 but with the mind this is not possible)
- access vs phenomenal consciousness; hard problem of consciousness and Mary's
room argument
Access consciousness =
An access-conscious state is a state directly available to you to drive your actions, speech,
and thoughts.
- accessible from 3rd person point of view
- it’s non-trivial: you cannot report how to ride a bike even if you have access to this
knowledge (but you can perform the action)
Knowing facts —> working memory, information storage in the brain —> third person
perspective —> reflective/thinking;
thinking about riding a bike —> connected to verbal reports
Phenomenal consciousness (qualia) ‘what it is like’ =
- the subjective feel or ‘what it is like’ to be in a particular state
- it is associated with a specific qualitative experience character
- is well-identifiable, temporally bound
- only accessible from the 1st person point of view
Experiences —> first person perspective.
What it is like, subjective experiences —> what a colour looks like —> automatic; riding a
bike
Once you give words (access) to a personal experience (phenomenal), the experience
changes. If you tell a client that the behaviour of their parents was not normal but abusive, the
experience changes.
Property dualism & consciousness
1. Property dualists: consciousness cannot be fully explained by physical laws.
2. What does this mean exactly?
They think that objective physical processes (including brain-facts) cannot explain
subjective experiences (the ‘what it is like’ or ‘qualia’)
Mary’s room =
, Mary is in a completely black and white room that has scientific knowledge about colours.
All the knowledge there is about colours. Will she learn new information when she leaves the
room and sees color for the first time?
- Intuitive answer: yes
- while in the room, mary does not know somethings about seeing red: what it is like to
see red (phenomenal consciousness)
- since Mary knew all the physical facts about color vision before her escape, what she
learns afterwards must be nonphysical
Substance versus property dualism and science
1. Property dualism is sometimes held to be more compatible with science than
substance dualism
2. Why think so? Arguments?
- non physical things (e.g., souls) are harder for science to accommodate
- non physical properties (e.g. consciousness) are easier
Is there an appropriate scientific method to investigate consciousness?
1. Introspection
- What about asking subjects to report their experience? (E.g. Wilhelm Wundt)
- ‘Every observation must, in order to make certain, be capable of being
repeated several times under the same conditions’
- Problem: it is unreliable. The reports cannot be independently observed and
tested by others
2. Neuroscience
- Is it better to directly study the brain?
- Say you observe 35-73 Hertz oscillations in the cerebral cortex. Why is it
these oscillations rather than others that produce conscious experience?
- How does the ‘what it is like’ to see a rainbow, to taste a strawberry, etc.
emerge from such brain activity? How can we explain this?
Predicate dualism =
Terms in our language → The mind and the body are different terms in our language so
they have different meanings
Hard problem =
To explain subjective experience (what it is like). Phenomenal problem because there is no
measurement unit you can measure experiences in, you cannot measure a 1st person
perspective. It is not enough to describe how the brain processes information: we need to
explain why this processing leads to conscious experience. No matter how much data about
echolocation or brain activity we collect, this will not allow us to understand the bat’s or
Mary’s first-person experience.
Summary property dualism
