Coursera - Introduction To The Philosophy of Mind - Handout PDF

Dr.
J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

MOOC – Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (January 2013)
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Introduction
Part one: Theories of Mind
i. Cartesian dualism
ii. Identity theories
iii. Functionalism
Part two: Mind as Computer
iv. Turing machines
v. Searle’s Chinese Room argument
Conclusions
Introduction
What is it to have a mind? We’re certain that anyone reading this handout has a mind. But
what are the special properties we consider ‘minded’ beings to have, and are these properties
shared by other animals, or even infants? In this lecture I introduce some of the approaches
contemporary philosophers have taken to the question of what it is to have a mind.
Some terminology: I will use the term ‘mental state’ to refer to any mental phenomenon, e.g.
thoughts, emotions, sensations. So the thought that beaver dams are cool, and the joy I feel
when I see beavers building a dam are examples of mental states that I can have.
Further reading
Clark, A. (2001). Mindware. Oxford University Press. (Introduction and chapter 1)
i. Cartesian (or Substance) Dualism

Cartesian dualism is the idea that the mind is made of a fundamentally different substance to
the body. The mind is made of immaterial stuff and the body is made of material stuff.
Material substances
• Have extension. Extension = occupies a certain amount of space.
Immaterial substances
• Do not have extension
1

Dr. J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh
According to Cartesian dualism, minds are made of immaterial ‘thinking’ substance which
does not occupy a place in space. The part of me that thinks exists independently of the body.
>> To find out more about how Descartes argued for this position, see Appendix 1.
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia & the problem of causation
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia was one of Descartes pupils. She pointed out that physical
things can only be changed by interaction with other physical things. If the mind is
immaterial (i.e. not physical) then how can it instigate changes in the body, which are
physical? It is clear that minds cause behaviours –it is my desire for juice that causes me to
walk to the fridge – but how can this be on Descartes’ position? She challenged Descartes to…
[…Explain] how the mind of a human being, being only a thinking substance, can
determine the bodily spirits in producing bodily actions. For it appears that all
determination of movement is produced by the pushing of the thing being moved, by
the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the qualification
and figure of the surface of the latter. Contact is required for the first two conditions,
and extension for the third. [But] you entirely exclude the latter from the notion you
have of the soul, and the former seems incompatible with an immaterial thing.
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1643. Cited Kim (2006, 41 -‐2)
Descartes faces the problem of explaining how minds can cause bodies to move if they are
made of substances which do not occupy a place in space. Similarly, he will also need to
explain how physical substances that we ingest can affect our minds, as is the case with
hallucinogens.
Further reading
Descartes’ 2nd and 6th Meditations. Many editions available.
ii. Identity theory
Physicalism is the view that all that exists is physical stuff, that is, stuff which has extension.
Therefore, whatever our explanation of mental phenomena is, it can’t go around citing
immaterial stuff! This gets around the problem of causation, because if mental phenomena
consist in physical stuff, just like our bodies, then they can interact with our bodies to cause
various behaviours.
On one view of physicalism mental phenomena, like thoughts and emotions etc., are identical
with certain physical phenomena, e.g. a cocktail of chemicals in our heads. This is known as
the identity theory. The identity theory of physicalism with regards to mental states claims
that having a mental state consists in being in a particular physical state. For example, being
in pain is identical to your C-‐fibres firing and there is nothing else to it than that. Identity
theory is a reductive account of mental states: it is reducing them to physical processes.
There are two ways of spelling out the identity theory, which rely on the token/type
distinction.
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The token/type distinction
‘How many dogs were at Crufts last year?’
This question could be interpreted in two ways. The questioner might be asking about how
many types of dogs (i.e. breeds) were at Crufts last year, and the answer would be ‘around
300’. Alternatively, she could be asking about how many individual dogs were at Crufts last
year, in which case the answer would be ‘around 3,000’. In the second case, philosophers
would say she is asking about how many dog ‘tokens’ there were at Crufts. If I were looking at
two Bassett hounds, we would say that I was looking at two tokens of the same type: I am
looking at one type of dog (namely, the Bassett hound type) and two instances of that type,
referred to as ‘tokens’.
This matters for our discussion because when an identity theorist says that mental
phenomena are identical with physical phenomena, we want to know whether she thinks:
a) That types of mental phenomena (e.g. the type ‘feeling sad’, or the type ‘feeling happy’)
are identical with types of physical phenomena (e.g. that ‘feeling sad’ can be reduced a
particular chemical cocktail). This is known as type-‐ identity theory. 1
Or
b) That instances, or tokens, of mental phenomena are identical with physical
phenomena. On this view, you can just claim that the happy feeling I had yesterday at
15:10 was identical with a physical state. This is known as token-‐ identity theory.
Type-‐ identity theory claims that for every type of mental phenomenon (feeling sad; feeling
happy; wanting something or hating something) there is a corresponding physical state. So
pains are identical with C-‐fibre activation2: my pain is identical with my C-‐fibres activation,
and your pain is identical with your C-‐fibres activation; my pain now is identical with C-‐fibre
activation and my pain yesterday lunch time was also identical with the activity of my C-‐fibres.
By contrast, token-‐identity theorists say that my pain yesterday was definitely identical with a
physical state. And my pain today is definitely identical with a physical state. And your pain
is identical with a physical state. But these physical states might all be different: the first
might be neuron 24 firing, whilst the second is neuron 408 firing. All the token-‐identity
theorist is committed to is that every mental phenomenon is identical with some physical
phenomenon.
Type-‐ identity theory offers a stronger research program. It says that types of physical states,
e.g. a surge in endorphins, are identical with types of mental state, e.g. feeling happy, and that
this is the case for all humans.
A problem for type-‐ identity theory

1
Strictly speaking ‘type-‐type’ identity theory because it says types of mental phenomena are identical
with types of physical phenomena.
2
Philosophers love to talk about C-‐fibres as being identical with pain. But, really, we know that the
neural correlates of pain are much more complicated. We also like discussing pain a lot, which gives a
worrying insight into the profession.
3

Hilary Putnam, in his 1967 paper ‘The Nature of Mental States’ raised the following objection
to type-‐identity theory, arguing that it is too narrow. Imagine that we find the cocktail of
chemicals which we are certain is type-‐identical to the mental state of feeling pain. Putnam
says that all we’ve done is find out the identity relation between pain and its physical
realisation in humans. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that octopus brains are made up of
totally different chemicals to human brains, but that we have good reason to believe that these
critters feel pain, e.g. they withdraw from hot stimuli, they engage in avoidance behaviour
around those stimuli, we see a spike in their brain activity when they touch hot things. Do we
want to deny them pain because their brains are made up of different stuff to ours? Of course
not, says Putnam.
Multiple realisability
The key point for Putnam is that mental states are multiply realisable. This just means that
any mental state, e.g. the mental state of wanting a pet beaver, can be instantiated in a variety
of different physical systems. It could be in a physical system made out of H2O and other
chemicals (like us) or a system made out of something totally different, like the chemicals in
an octopus brain.
To take a different example: in our society, money is made of bits of paper and metal. But in
other societies shells are used to trade with, and the value of various things is measured in
terms of how many shells they are worth. In other societies still livestock serve the function
that metal and paper serve in our society. But cows, shells and bits of paper and metal are all
recognisable as currency in virtue of them all playing a particular role (being traded for other
objects, and being a unit of value). Currency is thus multiply realisable: there are lots of
different things that are currency in different cultures, but they all share a common role.
iii. Functionalism
Putnam’s insight had a considerable impact on contemporary philosophy of mind. He was
saying that rather than thinking about mental phenomena in terms of what they might be
made of physically (because this leads to all sorts of problems when it comes to non-‐humans)
we should be thinking about them in terms of what they do. This led to the functionalist
account of mental states. Functionalists claim that trying to give an account of mental states
in terms of what they’re made of is like trying to explain what a chair is in terms of what it’s
made of. What makes something a chair is whether that thing can function as a chair: can it
support you sitting on it; does it have support for your back; does it raise your sitting position
up from the ground? Chairs can be made of lots of different things, and look completely
different, but what makes them identifiable as chairs is the job that they do.
Putnam’s big claim was that we should identify mental states not by what they’re made of, but
by what they do. And what mental states do is they are caused by sensory stimuli and current
mental states and cause behaviour and new mental states.
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The belief that tigers are dangerous is distinct from the desire to hug a tiger in virtue of what
that belief does. The desire to hug a tiger would cause me to rush towards the tiger with open
arms, and it might be caused by the belief that tigers are harmless human-‐loving creatures.
Whereas the belief that tigers are dangerous is caused by my previous knowledge that tigers
eat people and that creatures with big teeth are dangerous, and causes running away
behaviour as well as new mental states such as the dislike of the person who let the tiger into
the room in the first place. To make the contrast with type-‐identity clearer: on a type-‐identity
view what makes the belief that tigers are dangerous distinct from the desire to hug a tiger is
the different chemical cocktails which those states consist in. But functionalists say that this
is wrong: what makes each of these states distinct is their different functional roles. They
might also be made of different chemicals, but that’s by-‐the-‐by. The interesting difference lies
in what causes them and what they do.
Part two: Mind as Computer
Functionalism provides the segue to the next aspect of this lecture, namely, that it has become
very popular to think about the mind as analogous to a computer. Computers are information
processing machines: they take information of one kind, e.g. an electrical pulse caused by the
depression of a key, and turn it into information of another kind, e.g. displaying a number on
a screen. And one could argue that minds are also information processing machines: they take
information provided by our senses and other mental states which we have, process it and
produce new behaviours and mental states. We individuate mental states by the processes
that they can engage in, processes which require certain starting conditions (particular mental
states and sensations) and result in end conditions in the form of new mental states and
behaviours. The similarity goes further: what allows us to identify something as a computer or
a mind is what that thing does, and not what it is made of. In this next part of the lecture,
we’ll look at some of the consequences of the view that minds are computers.
iv. Turing machines
Computers come in varying degrees of complexity. There is a computer in my washing-‐
machine which controls the various cycles. There are also computers which can generate
complex probabilistic models which we use to predict all kinds of phenomena: weather cycles,
biological degradation, wave formations etc. If minds are computing machines, then how
complex does an information-‐processing system need to be before it counts as a mind? In his
landmark paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) Alan Turing (1912 – 1954)
proposed the following thought experiment as a response to this question.
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Turing asks us to imagine three people, a questioner and two respondents, a man and a
woman. The questioner is in a different room to the respondents, and can communicate with
them via an ‘instant messenger’ style set-‐up: the questioner types questions which appear on
screens in front of the responding man and woman, who in turn can type messages back. The
task set to the questioner is to determine which of the respondents, labelled only as X and Y, is
the man, and which is the woman. The man’s task is to mislead the questioner into believing
that he is the woman, and the woman’s task is to help the questioner.
The next stage of the game is very similar, except that the man is replaced by a computer, and
the questioner’s task is to determine which of the respondents is the human, and which is the
computer. As before, the computer’s task is to mislead the questioner into believing it is the
human, and the human-‐respondent’s task is to help the questioner. Turing’s hypothesis was
this: if a computer can consistently fool the interrogator into believing that it is a human, then
the computer has reached the level of functional complexity required for having a mind. (For a
cinematic interpretation of the Turing Test, take a look at Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner ).
There are, as ever, objections to the hypothesis. It might be possible, for example, that a
machine with an extremely large database with a powerful search engine passes the test.
Thus, when asked what 84 – 13 is, the machine whizzes to its set of files labelled ‘possible
subtraction sums’, pulls out the file labelled ’84 – 13’ (perhaps it is nestled between the files
labelled ‘84 – 14’ and ‘84 – 12’) and displays whatever it finds in that file. And it does the same
for questions like ‘do you prefer your martinis shaken or stirred’ or ‘what are your views on
Tarantino films?’ We would be reluctant to label such a machine a ‘thinking’ machine. This
suggests that Turing’s test is not sufficient for finding thinking machines, because it does not
take into account the internal structure of the machine. This example is intended to show
that the internal structure of a processing machine matters when it comes to determining
whether it is minded.
In addition to this concern, one might wonder if the Turing test is too limited: surely there
might be beings who cannot persuade the questioner that they are human but who we
nevertheless want to count as minded. The Turing test relies on language, and it sets very
narrow criteria for minds, namely, that they must be like human minds. But it is not a very
big stretch of the imagination to conceive of aliens who appear to act intelligently but who
would not be able to pass the Turing test.
Further reading
Turing, A. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59, 433 – 460. There are also
lots of free versions of the paper available on-‐line, and it pops up in lots of philosophy of mind
anthologies.
v. John Searle’s Chinese Room
The idea that the mind is a computing machine is certainly an attractive one. However, there
are problems with the view, and to finish I’d like to point to some of these using John Searle’s
Chinese Room thought experiment (1980). Searle asks us to imagine the following situation:
you are in a sealed room whose walls lined with books containing Chinese symbols. For the
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sake of the experiment, we shall assume that you do not understand any Chinese at all, in fact,
you are so ignorant of Chinese that you do not even know that the patterns in the book are
linguistic symbols. There is a slot leading into the room, through which occasionally come
pieces of paper with patterns on. You have a ‘code-‐book’ which contains a set of rules (written
in English) which tells you what to do when particular patterns are posted through the slot;
usually this means going to one of the books in the library, opening it to a particular page, and
copying the pattern you see there onto the piece of paper you have received, and posting it
back out through the slot. The code-‐book covers all possible combinations of patterns that
you might receive.
Now let’s suppose that outside of the room is a native speaker of Chinese. Unbeknownst to
you, she is posting questions in Chinese through the slot, and you are giving her coherent
answers to these questions. Although believes she is conversing with someone who
understands Chinese, you actually do not understand any Chinese at all, you don’t even know
that you are engaged in a communicative act!
Searle is pointing to a fundamental issue facing the view that the mind is a computing
machine. Computers work by processing symbols. Symbols have syntactic and semantic
properties. Their syntactic properties are their physical properties, e.g. shape. Their semantic
properties are what the symbol means, or represents. Thus, if I were to say “let  be the
symbol for ‘start dancing’”, then its syntactic properties are that it has four right angles and
four equilateral sides, and its semantic property is that it represents the instruction ‘start
dancing’, and that in certain contexts when we perceive this symbol we should start to dance.
Calculators, computers, etc. are symbol manipulating machines. But importantly, they are
only sensitive to the syntactic properties of symbols. We program machines with rules that
operate on the syntactic structure of the symbols it receives. One rule might be If input ‘A’ and
input ‘B’ produce output ‘A&B’. The computer can do this operation just by ‘looking’ at the
physical structure of the shapes.
The problem is that the computer does not ‘know’ that it is manipulating symbols that have
semantic content any more than the person inside Searle’s Chinese room knows she is
manipulating Chinese characters. This leads to a fundamental issue with the claim that the
mind is a computing machine: what part of the machine understands the symbols that it is
manipulating? With a computer it doesn’t matter that the machine’s processing has nothing
to do with the semantic content of the symbols, because it is the humans who use the
machine that have this information, we are the ones who give meaning to those symbols. But
if the mind is just a processor which operates on the syntactic properties of symbols, then how
can it produce a being who can understand the meaning of the symbols? How can a mind
think about dogs, when all it recognises are the syntactic properties of that symbol? Where is
the ‘programmer’ who deciphers the meaning of all the symbols?
The Chinese Room argument throws up all sorts of tricky questions, discussion of which we
shall have to leave for another day. I’ll leave you with one last puzzle.

7

Representation is a three way relation
What makes something a symbol or representation? We say that something is a
representation or symbol if it functions as one. When I’m at the pub, I might use beer-‐mugs
and coasters to represent a particular football formation on the table, and move them around
to demonstrate what happened in a game. The beer-‐mug is functioning to represent me on
the football pitch.
What we need to grasp here is that representation (including symbolic representation) is a
three way relation: X represents Y to Z; the beer-‐mug represents my position on the field to my
friends. But when it comes to minds, it’s not clear what fills the place of Z: this neural activity
represents a dog to ???
Conclusions
The aim of this lecture was to introduce some of the core topics in contemporary philosophy
of mind. We began by looking at the merits of physicalism over Cartesian Dualism. We then
turned to how the physicalist position has played out, first through identity theories and then
through functionalism. Functionalist was the catalyst for the popular move to start thinking
of minds as computers, information processing machines which operate on the syntactic
structures of symbols. By thinking about our minds containing symbols which can represent
states of affairs, we begin to address one of the fundamental questions in the philosophy of
mind: how can thoughts be about things?
We have not touched on how a symbol-‐crunching machine could possess consciousness.
Indeed, we have side-‐stepped the issue of consciousness altogether. That would be a topic for
another day. We have also passed over the intricacies of these debates: each of these topics
would be discussed over two or three weeks in our undergraduate classes! Despite this, I hope
the MOOC has given you some insight into some of the puzzles which have inspired, and
continue to intrigue, philosophers of mind.
Further reading
Clark, A. (2001) Mindware: an introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science O.U.P.
Crane, T. (1995) The Mechanical Mind Penguin
D. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (Eds.) The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
Basic Books

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Appendix 1: The argument from doubt
There are several arguments which Descartes offers for his dualistic account of the mind, but
the most famous is the argument from doubt (Discourse, second meditation):
1. I can doubt the existence of everything around me
2. I cannot doubt the existence of my thoughts (my mind)
3. Therefore, my mind must be made of something fundamentally different from
everything else around me.
Descartes believed that this argument shows that the mind must be made of a different
substance to his body and other things found in the physical world. This is because it has a
property which physical things do not: its existence cannot be doubted. To put it another
way: I can imagine that the physical world does not exist, but it is impossible for me to
imagine that I don’t exist because there has to be something which is doing the imagining!
Hence the famous Cogito: ‘I think therefore I am’. In order to think, there must be something
which is doing the thinking (namely, me).
There are significant problems with this argument. Most pressing, as pointed out by Leibniz
(in his Philosophical Papers) and Arnauld (a contemporary of Descartes) the argument is
revealing about the nature of the imagination (or doubt), but not necessarily about the nature
of the mind. ‘Doubt’ is such that we cannot apply it to our own minds but this does not tell us
anything about the nature of the mind.
An example might help here.3 Let’s imagine that I am unaware that Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. I
can imagine a scenario where Dr. Jekyll apprehends Mr. Hyde and leaves him in the custody of
the police, going home to a warm supper whilst Mr. Hyde languishes in the cells cursing
Jekyll. Yet this imagining does not inform me of what is in fact possible. Rather, it reveals a
limitation on my knowledge which cannot be appreciated from my current perspective. It is
perfectly logical to state that if two things have different properties then those two things
distinct. But this doesn’t hold once we throw psychological terms in there: ‘If I believe two
things to have different properties then they are distinct’. This is because my belief might not
match on to how the world actually is. I believe that Dr. Jekyll has the property of being kind,
and that Mr. Hyde lacks this property (being a murdering psychopath), and I infer from this
that because Dr Jekyll has a property that Mr. Hyde lacks, they must be distinct people. This
believing, however, does not preclude the possibility that they are identical.

3
My thanks to Dr. Paul Sludds who thought of this example!
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Dr.

J.S.Lavelle, University of Edinburgh

Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Part one: Theories of Mind

ii. Identity theories

Part two: Mind as Computer

iv. Turing machines

v. Searle’s Chinese Room argument

i. Cartesian (or Substance) Dualism

• Have extension. Extension = occupies a certain amount of space.

• Do not have extension

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia & the problem of causation

Descartes’ 2nd and 6th Meditations. Many editions available.

ii. Identity theory

The token/type distinction

‘How many dogs were at Crufts last year?’

A problem for type-­‐ identity theory

Part two: Mind as Computer

iv. Turing machines

v. John Searle’s Chinese Room

Representation is a three way relation

Crane, T. (1995) The Mechanical Mind Penguin

Appendix 1: The argument from doubt

1. I can doubt the existence of everything around me

2. I cannot doubt the existence of my thoughts (my mind)

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A problem for type-‐ identity theory