V The mind-body problem

V.1. Mind and body

V.1.1. The mental and physical distinction
We owe the mental-physical distinction as we currently understand it to Ren
Descartes (1596-1650), for him the physical is res extensa (extended substance) and the
mental is res cogitans (thinking substance). In philosophy of mind the fact that
something is considered physical does not imply that it is not mental, some theories
claim that mental phenomena are physical (physicalism) while other theories claim that
physical phenomena are mental (idealism).
One definition of "physical" can be the cartesian in terms of extension, physical
entities have the property of taking up space, the problem is that things like electrons
have no extension but seem nevertheless physical. Also we could define the physical in
terms of things composed of matter, but energy is the main category in modern physics.
So we are going to define "physical" more broadly by the descriptive and explanatory
resources of moderns physics with no further precision, that its, things subject to the
laws of physics.
The "mental" could then be defined by the descriptive and explanatory
resources of psychological discourse (of folk psychology, not necessarily scientific
psychology). Mental phenomena are the kind of things to which we attribute predicates
such as "believes" or "desires". The mental has certain important features which have to
be pointed out:
a) First person authority: it is the idea that the knowledge each of us has of his or
her own mental states is in some sense privileged. This doesn't imply infallibility
or incorrigibility: I can be wrong about what I believe, desire or feel and other
people can correct me about what I believe, desire or feel. But if I'm mistaken
the burden of the proof is on others, firstly my convictions have to be considered
accurate. From this authority some philosophers have inferred that the mental is
an inner domain of private experiences to which only the person experiencing
them has direct and non-inferential access whereas other people's access to my
mental states is indirect and inferential (I can keep my thoughts secret, my
sensations are non-transferable and mi intentions can be easily misinterpreted).
Nevertheless the discussion of the internal/external, inner/outer, private/public,
subjective/objective character of the mental is an important part of the mindbody problem, so it cannot be assumed from the beginning the subjective
character of mental states without begging the question. The first person
authority is a much modest assumption.
b) Phenomenal consciousness and qualia: the notion of "consciousness" does not
refer here to mere awareness (or self-awareness) as opposed to
"unconsciousness", but to the phenomenal aspects of experiences. Those
phenomenal aspects are usually referred to as "qualia" (literally "qualities" in
Latin), the qualitative aspects of any mental state, the "something it is like" (the
"quale" in singular) to live through. I may describe my pleasure when eating ice
cream and be very precise about it, but nevertheless my description is not "like
the pleasure of eating an ice-cream", the quale (the qualitative experience) of
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feeling that pleasure is absent in my description. Both phenomenal

consciousness or qualia are concepts which express the idea of third-person
inaccessibility to mental states and therefore are not always accepted as valid by
philosophers who deny the subjective/objective divide.
c) Intentionality: it is the feature some mental states have of being directed at
something, of being 'about' (like my beliefs) or 'of' (like my fear) or 'for' (like
my hope) something. The word "intentionality" derives from the Latin word
"intensio", which was used to describe an archer with his bow drawn (having the
bow in tension, aimed at a target), but it is not "intending" ("intention" in this
sense is just one possible intentional mental state). The intentionality is the
"aboutness" of mental states, and it is an important feature of it that what those
mental states are about or of or for need not exist (I may fear zombies,
werewolves or witches). Mental states such as beliefs and desires can be
expressed as propositional attitudes because they're expressed as attitudes
toward certain propositions ("I believe that philosophy is interesting" o " I desire
that philosophy is interesting" express my attitude toward the proposition
"philosophy is interesting", I'm taking a certain stance toward it: I believe it is
true or I desire it to be the case).
d) Rationality: it is the idea that to describe people's behavior in terms of
intentional mental states is to classify that behavior as something that is
explainable by appeal to reasons. "Reasons" are a special kind of explanatory
cause which appeals to the language of psychology and not of physics, we
appeal to reasons when we say things such as "he switched on the light because
he wanted to see better" as opposed to "he switched on the light because his
fingers pressed the switch", this is a non-rational explanation of this behavior
(non-rational doesn't mean irrational).
First person authority (understood as subjectivity) and qualia are central to
private conceptions of mental phenomena (those which take these phenomena to be
inner, subjective occurrences to which only the individual person experiencing them has
direct access). Intentionality and rationality are crucial for public conceptions of mental
phenomena (those which take these phenomena to consist in the various ways we
comport ourselves toward engagement with the world, ways which can be described and
evaluated in rational terms).

V.1.2. Mind-body problems

Mind-body problems have two features in common: the distinction between
mental phenomena and physical phenomena, and premises that make difficult to
understand how mental and physical phenomena are related. Those problems arise when
we try to understand how thought, feeling, perception, action, and other mental
phenomena are related to events in the human nervous system. In our everyday life we
take ourselves to be free beings who act as we do because we have beliefs, desires,
hopes, and fears. In our scientific dealings, however, we see the universe as a vast sea of
matter and energy and at a fundamental level there is no difference between humans and
rocks, trees or animals, all of them are made of subatomic particles which have no
beliefs or desires, hopes or fears.

We thus confront two images of human life: the everyday, pre-scientific image of
ourselves as free, rational beings with mental and moral lives, and the scientific image
of ourselves as complex biochemical systems.
V.1.2.1. The problem of psychophysical emergence
Life and mind did not always exist in the universe, this suggests that the physical
conditions that existed before their emergence had to be responsible in some way for
bringing them about. We are conscious beings with mental states, yet we are composed
entirely of non-conscious parts such as molecules. How do our conscious experiences
emerge our of these non-conscious physical interactions? It seems that if n physical
particles are insufficient to produce consciousness, then n+1 particles will be
insufficient as well and, in that case, it looks like no number of subatomic collisions will
be sufficient to produce conscious experiences. How, then, did consciousness manage to
emerge in the course of the universe's history? And how, for that matter, does
consciousness manage to emerge in you and me right now?
This is the problem of psychophysical emergence, and in order to solve it we
could try to prove, for instance, either that we're not conscious beings (eliminative
physicalism), or that we're not entirely composed of non-conscious parts (substance
dualism and idealism), or that a certain number of non-conscious parts could combine to
produce a conscious whole (dual-attribute theory, reductive physicalism and nonreductive physicalism).
V.1.2.1. The problem of other minds
There is a tension between our objective, third-person knowledge of human
behavior, and our apparently subjective, fist-person knowledge of our own conscious
states. We often know through ordinary interactions with them what other people think
and how they feel, yet, mental states seem to be a private, subjective phenomena, but if
thoughts and feelings seems to belong to a private, inner domain of subjective
experiences, then other people cannot know what my mental states are; in fact, they
cannot even know whether I have any mental states since a human body seems capable
of operating in just the way it does without having any conscious states at all (they
might simply be automata that act in every way as if they have conscious experiences
like mine, while yet having no inner mental life at all). How, then, is it possible to have
the knowledge of people we ordinarily take ourselves to have?
This is the problem of other minds, and in order to solve it we could try to
prove, for instance, that it is false that we often know what other people think and how
they feel (most dualisms) or that mental states belong to a private, subjective domain
(most physicalisms).
V.1.2.1. The problem of mental causation
Another tension is that between our commonsense understanding of people's
reasons for performing actions and our scientific understanding of the physical
mechanisms involved in their performance. I assume that my mental states are
responsible for producing my actions, that is, actions appear to be physical events with
mental causes. Physical events, however, can be triggered by other physical events, is
we stimulate the nervous system in the right way, we can trigger exactly the same bodily
movements that are involved in your actions. Therefore, two distinct causes seem to

coincide in our actions: they have a physical cause, an event or series of events in our
nervous system, and they also have a mental cause, the desire to perform them. How are
the mental cause of your action and its physical cause related?
This is the problem of mental causation, and in order to solve it we could try
to prove, for instance, that actions do not really have mental causes (eliminative
physicalism and epiphenomenalism), or that actions do not really have physical causes
(substance dualism) or finally that mental and physical causes are not distinct
(physicalism).

V.2. Dualism
Dualism
Substance dualism
Interactionist dualism

Dual-attribute theory

Parallelism

Emergentism

Epiphenomenalism

Dualistic theories of mind deny that a single conceptual framework is sufficient

to describe and explain everything. Rather, a complete description and explanation of
everything requires that we use both the mental and the physical conceptual
frameworks. There are, then, two fundamentally distinct kinds of properties individuals
can have: mental properties, which are expressed by the predicates of the mental
framework ("I feel pain"), and physical properties, which are expressed by the
predicates of the physical framework ("My C fibres have been stimulated"). Among
dualistic theories, dual-attribute theories (or non substantial dualism) claim that the
very same individual can have both mental and physical properties. Substance dualistic
theories deny this. The very same individual cannot have both mental properties and
physical properties, they claim. According to substance dualists, mental beings such as
human minds have no physical properties at all, and physical beings such as human
bodies have no mental properties. This implies that there are not only two
fundamentally distinct kinds of properties, but also two fundamentally distinct kinds of
individuals as well: those with exclusively mental properties, and those with exclusively
physical properties.

V.2.1. Substance dualism and its problems: the ghost in the machine
and other minds
"There is a doctrine about the nature and place of the mind which is prevalent
among theorists, to which most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe with
minor reservations. Although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume
that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the
theory.... [the doctrine states that] every human being has both a body and a mind. (...) The body
and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body the mind may
continue to exist and function.
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as
'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'."
Gilbert Ryle, The concept of mind

Substance dualism claims that persons and bodies are distinct. Persons, such
as you and I, are purely mental beings, we have no physical properties. Bodies, on the
other hand, have no mental properties because they're purely physical beings. Not only,
then, are there two distinct kinds of properties, mental and physical, but there are also
two distinct kinds of individuals or substance (hence "substance dualism").
Substance dualism has been endorsed by such important philosophers as Plato
and Descartes, although the word they used for "mind" or "person" was "soul", which
they pretended to be immortal, hence different from the mortal body. Reincarnation (in
Eastern religions and Plato's philosophy) and immortality (in Western religions) are the
main motivation for endorsing substance dualism: if we are non-physical beings
attached to a body we might be capable of a detached existence once the body is dead.
Also Descartes thought that only a non-physical substance could have free will: if we
are part of the physical universe we must be completely governed by fundamental
physical laws, and hence cannot really be free. Substance dualism is compatible with
the immortality of the person and avoids the free will debate. Also, dualists argue, it is
both possible and conceivable that I might exist without a body, which then wouldn't be
an essential property of persons (such as thought or free will) but an accidental
property, therefore I certainly I'm not my body.
Nevertheless most contemporary philosophers would reject substance
dualism for its side effects: a) counterintuitive notion of "person", b) difficulties in
explaining mental-physical interaction and c) problems to know other minds.
a) According to substance dualists humans are not persons since living beings,
organisms (humans, in particular), are physical beings with physical properties
(just check a biology textbook), but I (the person) am a mental entity with
mental properties, so I'm not a human organism, I just causally interact with it
because I'm somehow "attached" to it. But how is this interaction possible? This
takes us to b).
b) According to substance dualism persons are completely nonphysical entities and
beliefs, desires, pains and other mental phenomena are completely nonphysical.
Yet, it seems that physical events like actions have mental causes, but how
can this causal interaction be possible? The movements of a body are
produced by muscular contractions, those in turn are triggered by ions which are
released by neuronal firings, which are triggered in turn by the depolarization of
the neuronal membranes which results from interaction with other neurons of
with some environmental stimulus. If anything would have to intervene in that
series of events, it would have to bring about one of the steps in the series, but
any of them requires a transfer of energy and, since energy is something
physical, this seems incompatible with the ghostly nature of persons which are
completely nonphysical entities. Energy transformations occur at specific spatial
locations, and it is at the very least unclear how something without any location
at all could manage to bring them about.
c) According to substance dualism we cannot directly perceive other people's
mental states because they're a subjective phenomenon, neither indirectly infer
them from bodily behavior because the body is not the person. In fact, if
substance dualism is true it is difficult to see how could we know about the
existence of other minds (just minds have direct access to their own mental
states). But it seems that we can know what mental states other people have
and that other people exist. Our knowledge of other people, however, is a
fundamental starting point for understanding who and what we are.

Problem b) is considered the genuine "ghost in the machine" problem and the
main proof in the case against substance dualism, that's why non-interactionist versions
of substance dualism followed Descartes's theory. Parallelism tries to avoid the
problem of interaction claiming that persons and bodies do not interact but merely
appear to interact because they operate in parallel: their states are correlated without
interacting (Leibniz's philosophy would be an example). Another way out of the
problem would be occasionalism: occasionalists such as Malebranche claim that God
acts as a causal middleman who coordinates changes in persons with changes in bodies
(so, each interaction is a miracle). Those theories look clearly ad hoc and solve one
problem at the price of committing her supporters with many other premises, some of
them highly counterintuitive. Also, even thought they skip problem b), they still have to
face problems a) and c).
Finally the main charge against substance dualism would be explanatory
impotence. Aristotle criticized dualists (such as Plato) for offering no explanation of
why persons would have the bodies they do. Can dualists explain the correlation
between mental states and large-brained mammals, or the nervous system? They can't.
These examples show that substance dualism is explanatorily inferior to other theories,
endorsing it poses problems to the explanation of how mind and body interacts, which is
probably the core of philosophy of mind. Why postulating a ghost to rule the machine if
how it does it is more problematic than our initial problems?

V.2.2. Non substantial dualism: epiphenomenalism and emergentism

Dual-attribute theories (DAT) are committed to the conjunction of:
a. Property dualism: the claim that there are mental properties, that there
are physical properties, and that mental and physical properties are
distinct.
b. Psychophysical coincidence: the claim that the same individual can have
both mental and physical properties.
They claim, therefore, that mental and physical properties are distinct (as
substance dualism claims) and that the same individual can have properties of both sorts
(as most forms of physicalism claim).The most popular forms of DAT are emergentism
and epiphenomenalism, they both claim that some organisms have both mental and
physical properties and that mental properties are generated or produced by physical
interactions in those physical organisms. DATs are sometimes conflated with forms of
nonreductive physicalism, but those do not support property dualism.
Epiphenomenalists claim that emergent mental phenomena are causally inert;
they have no causal powers in their own right, and can influence nothing that happens
in the physical universe. Mental phenomena exist, and because they exist a complete
account of the universe must include a description of them using a vocabulary that is
appropriate to the task (a mental vocabulary). But according to epiphenomenalists,
emergent mental selves produce or give rise to nothing, emergent mental properties are
merely causal byproducts of certain physical processes (as heat in the engine of a car).
The more important argument for epiphenomenalism (which makes it more
attractive than nonreductive physicalism, to which it is very similar) is the existence of
qualia and the impossibility to explain or describe them physically. Most arguments
against epiphenomenalism insist on the incoherence of the concept of qualia, Dennett's
argument against qualia and Wittgenstein's private language argument are the more
representative.

Emergentists endorse a multilevel worldview (the social scientific level emerges

from the psychological level, which emerges from the biological level, which emerges
from the molecular level, which emerges from the atomic level, which emerges from the
fundamental physical level) and higher levels do not correspond to abstract ways of
describing lower-level processes (as nonreductive physicalists claim) but to distinctive
classes of properties that result from the organization of lower-lower level components
(from the composition of fundamental physical particles emerge atomic properties and
events, from the composition of atoms emerge molecular properties and events, from
the composition of molecules emerge biological systems properties and events, from
composition of biological systems [such as neurons in brains] emerge psychological
properties and events, from composition of psychological systems [such as minds]
emerge economic, political and other social system properties and events). Emergentism
was very popular in the first quarter of the 20 th century but latter empirical data
(advances in chemistry and biology) suggested a different explanation for the multilevel
worldview with no appeal to emergent forces. Also, emergentism faces serious
problems with mental causation because it claims, as substance dualism, that mental
properties have a causal influence on the physical domain.

V.3. Monism

Monism
Physicalism

Idealism
Reductive physicalism
Identity theory

Eliminative physicalism

Functionalism

Neutral monism
Non-reductive physicalism

Supervenience physicalism

Anomalous monism

Monistic theories of mind claim that there is fundamentally one kind of thing.
Physical monism or physicalism claims that everything is physical, everything can be
exhaustively described and explained by physics. Mental monism, which is typically
called "idealism", claims that everything is mental, everything can be exhaustively
described and explained using our pre-scientific psychological concepts. Neutral
monists such as William James or Bertrand Russell claim that everything is neither
mental nor physical but neutral, but their failure to provide an informative definition of
neutral phenomena have turned this view marginal in philosophy of mind. Physicalism
is the dominant paradigm within monism, so this section will focus just on the main
trends within physicalism.
Physicalist theories claim that everything is physical. Metaphysical physicalism
has traditionally been called "materialism" or "materialistic monism": there's just one
substance in reality, matter. Marxism would be an example of materialism applied to the
theory of history and society. Within the philosophy of mind (at least among English
speaking philosophers), after nineteenth-century energy physics convinced scientists
that matter was not the basic category that unified the subject matter of physics,
materialist philosophers began calling themselves "physicalists". They belong to three

varieties of physicalism: eliminativism, reductive physicalism and non-reductive

physicalism.
The main reasons to support physicalism are past scientific success and that
it avoids most of the main drawbacks of many versions of dualism (the problem of
mental causation and the problem of other minds). On the other hand, the main
problem it has to deal with is the explanation of subjectivity or qualia (to which
existence many physicalists object).

Physicalists make an inductive generalization from past scientific success of

physical descriptions of events. In the past, non-physical explanations of natural events
have failed (epilepsy as "being possesed by a demon", for instance) whereas physical
attempts have succeeded (epilepsy as a "neurological disorder which produces epileptic
seizures due to excessive and abnormal cortical nerve cell activity in the brain"). Since
it has always been the case in the past, we have good reason to think this will always be
the case, and that physical explanation of mental phenomena will succeed and
everything is physical. Many mental events have been proven to correspond to brain
(and therefore physical) states through PET (Positron Emission Tomography), and
mental states can be altered with purely physical mechanisms (brain damage, drugs or
electric stimulation of parts of the brain cortex).

Nevertheless the fact that mental events correspond to physical events does not
entail necessarily that the language of the mental ought to be reduced to the language of
the physical. Philosophers who defend that option support reductive physicalism, those
who object to it are non-reductive physicalists, and finally there's those who consider
that mentalist language just makes not sense and is therefore irreductible to physical
descriptions and it will eventually disappear. This last option is called eliminativism.
For eliminativism folk psychology and mental vocabulary refer to something
which doesn't exist, they lack reference and are therefore useless to describe physical
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events of the "mental" kind. It's like speaking of "the release of phlogiston" to describe
"combustion", both things are untranslatable because they refer to different realities, the
former non existing. Psychological discourse has no descriptive or explanatory
legitimacy, they are no beliefs, hopes, joys or pains, they are the by-product of a
defective conceptual framework that may have been useful at one time (like explaining
the weather through the action of gods), but that will be eliminated as soon as a
complete scientific understanding of human behavior is achieved.
Here we will focus on forms of physicalism which claim that psychological
discourse does have descriptive and explanatory legitimacy, even though it wouldn't
manage to be as successful for describing and explaining human behavior as it appears
to be.

V.3.2. Reductive physicalism

Reductive physicalism claims that ordinary psychological discourse (of beliefs,
desires...) will be retained when we develop a complete scientific account of human
behavior, and that its categories will correspond in some straightforward way to, they
will be reduced to, the categories of physical theory (the burden for exponents of these
theories is to explain the nature of this correspondence). We can trace back physicalism
at least to Democritus (c. 460 BCE - c. 370 BCE), and it is present in modern
philosophy in Thomas Hobbes' (1588-1679) and Julien Offray de La Metrie's (17091751) theories. Nevertheless physicalism did not blossom into a serious theory of mind
until the 20th century. By the 1950s physicalism had become the dominant position in
philosophy of mind in both its reductivist and non-reductivist versions.
The first prominent reductive physicalist theory was behaviorism. In
psychology it was defended by J. B. Watson and F. Skinner, and in its more extreme
version (radical behaviorism) it defended that psychology should concern itself only
with observable phenomena not even postulating inner causal mechanisms to explain
overt behavior. Psychological behaviorism had a philosophical counterpart called
logical behaviorism according to which psychological descriptions are abbreviations
for physical descriptions of actual and potential behavior so, for instance, "I am in
pain" means actually "I am perspiring, my pupils are dilated, I am wincing, I'm trying to
escape from a potentially harmful stimulus, I'm crying...". Mental states are equivalent
to actual or potential behaviors. An argument against behaviorism would be the
result of the Ludovico technique in A clockwork orange. Apparently psychological
language does not describe overt behavior but causes of overt behavior, also we can
pretend to be in a certain mental state through simulation of behavior, therefore both
shouldn't be equivalent. Finally, as all sorts of physicalism, behaviorism have problems
explaining subjectivity and qualia: if my mental states are just observable behavior,
apparently I can know what those are (first-person authority) by observing my own
behavior in the way I observe the behavior of others, but it seems that I surely know my
pain by directly feeling it, not through observation.
In psychology the 1960s gave rise to a new paradigm called cognitive
psychology which has been the dominant trend hitherto, and behaviorism was
progressivelly dimised. In philosophy of mind the theory which became the core of
reductive physicalism was (and still is) psychophysical identity theory.
Behaviorism had defended the reduction of mental states to behaviors, identity
theory defends the ultimate reduction of mental states to brain states. For identity
theorists mental states would be proven to be equivalent through the scientific
investigation of the nervous system to physical states (more specifically brain states).
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"Pain" is nowadays described through a description of some of its causes and effects
(typically caused by pinpricks, burns, abrasions and that typically causes winces, groans
and similar behavior), and neuroscience would eventually find that there's a "brain state
P" which has exactly the same causes and effects that the mental state "Pain", therefore
"Pain" and "brain state P" are identical. There's at list two arguments in favour of the
psychophysical identity theory: Ockham's razor (identity theory can explain
everything property dualism can explain postulating just one type of entity) and
coherence with physicalism principles (if physicalism is true then mental states are
defined by their typical environmental causes and typical behavioral effects; also, if
physicalism is true then only states capable of having those typical causes and effects
are physical states; therefore, mental states must be physical states). The main
argument against identity theory is the multiple-realizability argument (but also
any argument defending the existence of qualia).

V.3.2. Non-reductive physicalism

Nonreductive physicalists reject the reduction of psychology to physics. They
claim that physics satisfy some of our descriptive and explanatory necessities, but not
all, and the vocabulary of the mental is descriptively and explanatory useful. The
reductivist worldview dominated philosophy of mind for many years, but the multiplerealizability argument together with functionalism inspired a new type of mind-body
theory: nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalism soon became the new
orthodoxy in philosophy of mind and, although controversial, remains the most popular
type of physicalism today.
The problem of nonreductive physicalists is: if everything is explained and
described by physics and, the categories of the mental vocabulary are different from the
categories of physics, how do they manage to refer to reality? The more interesting
strategies within nonreductive physicalism are functionalism and anomalous monism.
Functionalism is a theory that takes psychological discourse to be a species of
abstract, computational discourse. The theory was originally formulated as an
alternative to the identity theory by Hilary Putnam who claimed that psychological
descriptions are like Turing machine descriptions: abstract descriptions that postulate
inputs, outputs, and internal states which correlate the two (in particular beliefs and
desires). Our brain would be mere hardware and our mind a software able to correlate
inputs to a system with outputs from it in appropriate ways (satisfying Turing's test).
The correspondence between abstract descriptions and concrete systems is a
"realization", abstract descriptions (higher order properties, that is, functional states,
logical constructions) "realize" or match the states (lower-order properties) postulated
by those descriptions. For Putnam mental properties are higher order properties defined
by its conditions of specification ("this" qualifies as a "something of this sort" if it
satisfies the conditions "this sort of things" usually met, if it has its higher-order
properties, for instance, a piece of wood, metal or rubber qualifies as a doorstop exactly
if it satisfies the following condition: it stops a door from closing). Being in a mental
state amounts to having some set of first-order internal states that are related to each
other in ways that satisfy a functional description.
Functionalism has to face the liberalism objection (functionalism leads us to
attribute mental states to systems that do not have them), the argument of
philosophical zombies or other versions of qualia arguments and the Chinese room
argument.

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Another highly influential nonreductivist theory is Donald Davidson's

anomalous monism which claims that everything is physical and that pyschological
discourse is anomalous, that is, there are no laws that can be formulated using a
psychological vocabulary. This implies both that there are no laws featuring exclusively
mental predicates, and that there are no laws featuring mental predicates in combination
with physical predicates. Consequently, anomalous monism rejects the possibility of
psycho physical reduction. Nevertheless mental states cause physical states, therefore
mental states must have physical descriptions, that is, they must be physical states. The
reason mental and physical descriptions are not necessarily correlated one-one is that
they satisfy different interests. We use physical descriptions when we are interested in
describing events in terms of the strict laws that explain causal connections among
them. We use mental descriptions when we are interested in describing events in terms
of their rational relations to other events, their positions within a broader network of
reasons. Psychological discourse is interpretive, we use it to construct interpretations of
someone's behavior that renders it rational.
All forms of nonreductive physicalism are challenged by Jaegwon Kim's
trilemma.
JAWORSKI, WILLIAM. 2011. Philosophy of Mind: a comprehensive introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Most of these notes
are retouched excerpts of this book.

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