It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the
accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony,
I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark
of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one
in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle
was nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a
convulsive motion agitated its limbs. Frankenstein, 1818
Thus Mary Shelley describes the moment of triumph and disaster for Victor
Frankenstein in her novel. He had sought the origin of life by a process
of analysis, dissecting the human body and exploring its various components.
He had observed the changes that take place on death, the corruption of the
various organs, and had longed to reverse that process, to bring life back
to the dead. Then he collected the 'materials' for his experiment - all the
various bits of human anatomy - and fashioned them into a human-like creature.
Eventually he finds the secret of their animation, and in that horrifying
moment, the creature which he has fitted together comes to life. (In Shelley's
novel details of this process are not given, but later film treatments of
the Frankenstein story have generally focused on electricity - the 'spark
of life' being brought about by the sparks of electrical discharge.)
Released into the world, the 'creature', not fully human and shunned by society,
nevertheless develops human emotions, 'reasoning and skills. Filled with
both tenderness and rage, longing for a mate of his own kind and murderously
angry with Frankenstein for creating him thus, he asks 'Who am I?' The
'philosophy of mind', or 'philosophical psychology', is that branch of philosophy
which undertakes the Frankenstein-like task on analysing bodies, minds and
persons, dissecting them and attempting to re-animate them, in order to
understand the nature of intelligent life. As you read this book, your eyes
are scanning from left to right, your fingers turn the pages, your brain
is consuming energy, taking oxygen from its blood supply, tiny electrical
impulses are passing between brain cells. All that is part of the physical
world, and can be detected scientifically. How does all that relate to the
process of reading, thinking, learning and remembering? And how do both relate
to personal identity? If, as the result of an accident, I were to have an
arm or leg amputated, I should refer to the detached member as 'my arm' or
my leg', not in the sense that I owned it, but that I regarded it as part
of myself, a part which I must now do without. In the same way, I can list
all the parts of myself: my hair, my face, my body, my mind, my emotions,
my attitudes. Some of these will be parts of my mental make-up, others will
be parts of my physical body. Where in all this is the real 'me'?
-
Am I to be identified with my physical body? With my mind?
-
Am I somehow a collection of all these things?
-
Do I exist outside my body? If so, could I continue to exist
after the death of my body?
-
Is my mind the same thing as
my brain? If not, then where is my mind?
-
Can I ever really know other people's minds, or do I just
look, listen and guess what they're thinking?
-
What about computer-created
artificial intelligence?
These are just some of the questions that are explored within
the philosophy of mind. Its issues relate to biology, psychology, sociology,
computer science, and all possible matters related to human thought, memory,
communication and personal identity. But we shall start with a basic question,
which opens up many of these issues: How is my mind related to my body?
The relationship between mind and body
Philosophy has explored a whole range of possible relationships
between mind and body. At one extreme there is the idea that only the physical
body and its activity are real (materialism and behaviourism), at the other
is the rarer idea that everything is fundamentally mental (idealism). Most
philosophers come to a view that both bodies and minds have distinct but
related realities (dualism). How exactly they are related is a further problem,
and so our consideration of dualism has many sub-theories.
Materialism
A materialist attempts to explain everything in terms of physical objects,
and tends to deny the reality of anything that cannot be reduced to them.
So, for a materialist, the mind or 'self' is nothing more than a way of
describing physical bodies and their activity. We may experience something
as a thought or emotion, but in fact it is nothing more than electrical impulses
in the brain, or chemical or other reactions in the rest of the body. Points
to consider:
-
Apply electrical shocks to the brain, and the personality can
be affected. (This is the basis of a form of treatment for severe depression,
simulating epileptic fits.)
-
A person who suffers brain damage is no longer the same. In
severe cases he or she may not appear to be a person at all, but merely a
living body, devoid of all the normal attributes of mind.
Do these examples confirm the materialist view? Materialism
takes a reductionist approach to mental activity (see p.13). A person is
nothing but a brain, attached to a body and nervous system.
The 'nothing but' distinguishes materialism from other theories, for nobody
would deny that, in some sense, a person is related to a brain, in the same
way as a symphony is related to air movements. The essential question is
whether or not it is possible to express what a 'something more' might be,
if the materialist position seems inadequate.
For reflection
You see people waving to you and smiling.
-
Does that indicate that they are friendly? That they know you?
That they have minds as well as bodies? That they have freely chosen to act
in that way? That they have previously recognised you, had friendly thoughts
towards you, and therefore decided to wave?
-
Let us analyse what is actually happening as you look at one
of those people:
- You see an arm moving.
- Within that arm, muscles are contracting.
- The contraction is caused by chemical changes, brought about by electrical
impulses from the brain.
- Brain activity depends on consuming energy and having an adequate oxygen
supply via the blood.
- Nutrition and oxygen are taken in from the environment.
- And so on, and so on.
-
The act of waving is explained in terms of a material chain
of cause and effect. That chain is, for practical purposes, infinite - it
depends upon the whole way in which the universe is constructed. There is
no point in that chain for some 'mind' to have its say - the world of sense
experience is a closed system, and everything in it is totally determined.
That is the materialist perspective, but - as far as the idea of a closed
system of causes is concerned - it also follows from the ideas of Kant, for
whom the phenomena of experience were determined, and causality was imposed
on them by the human mind. The difference between the materialist and Kant
is that Kant holds that there are minds and things-in-themselves but we cannot
know them through sense experience, whereas the materialist holds that there
is nothing other than the material world known to the senses.
|
Behaviourism
is the term used for the rather crude materialist theory that mental phenomena
are in fact simply physical phenomena. Crying out and rubbing a part of the
body is what pain is about. Shouting and waving a fist is what anger is about.
All mental states are reduced by the behaviourist to things that can be observed
and measured. People usually take a behaviourist position because they hold
a radical empirical view of philosophy - everything must be reduced to
sensations. The problem is that we experience a difference between a sensation
or thought and the physical movement or the words that result from it. I
can think before I speak, or before I write, but for a behaviourist there
is nothing other than the words or the writing. To know a feeling, for a
behaviourist, one must observe behaviour.
Idealism
The opposite of materialism is idealism: that reality is mental rather than
physical. What we see of our body, and the bodies of others, are sense
experiences; and these, after all, are simply impressions we get in our minds.
Descartes, realising that his senses could always be deceived, came to the
view that 'I think, therefore I am' as the starting point for philosophy.
All he knew for certain was the fact of his own thought. Descartes used that
fact as a basis for a dualist viewpoint, for he did not deny the reality
of bodies, whereas a strict idealist holds that mind is the only reality.
One criticism of the idealist approach might be that, although we may
not be certain of the existence of matter, for all practical purposes we
have to assume it. However much other people are merely sense impressions
in our mind, we infer that there are people with minds and bodies like ours
that are causing those impressions. Two idealist philosophers were mentioned
in Chapter 1: Berkeley (see p. 19) and Leibniz (see p.32).
Dualism
If neither the materialist nor the idealist position convinces you by its
account for the relationship between mind and body, the answer may
be sought in some form of dualism: that mind and body are distinct and very
different things. Each is seen as part of the self, part of what it means
to be a person, but the question then becomes: How do these two things
interact?
This question has a long history. In Phaedo, Plato argued for the
immortality of the soul on two grounds:
1 That the body was composite, and was therefore perishable, whereas
the mind was simple, and therefore imperishable.
2 That the mind had knowledge of the universals, the eternal forms
(such as 'goodness itself') rather than individual events and objects. Because
it relates to the immortal realm (the forms being immortal, because not
particular), the soul is itself immortal and able
to survive the body.
Few people today would wish to take up these arguments in the form that Plato
presented them. But they persist in two widely accepted features of the mind/body
question:
1 That the mind is not within space/time
and not material - and thus that it should not be identified with its
material base in the brain.
2 That the mind functions through communication - is not simply limited
to the operations of a single particular body, i.e. the mind is not subject
to physical limitations, and is related to transpersonal communication.
Descartes' starting point in the quest for knowledge, 'I think,
therefore I am', implied a radical distinction between the world of matter,
known to the senses, and the mental world, known (at least in one's own case)
directly. They are two different realms, distinct but interacting. The mind,
for Descartes, is able to deflect the flow of physical currents in the nervous
system, and thus influence the mechanical working of the physical body. For
Descartes, there has to be a point of interaction, for in all other respects
he considers the material world to be controlled by mechanical forces, and
without a mental component to make a difference, there would be no way in
which a mental decision to do something could influence that otherwise closed
mechanical world. One danger here is to imagine the mind as some kind of
subtle, invisible body, existing in the world of space and time, yet not
subject to its usual rules of cause and effect. This, of course, is a rather
crude caricature of what Descartes and other dualists have actually claimed.
(It is also an important caricature, having been used by Gilbert Ryle in
The Concept of Mind (1949), a most influential book for an understanding
of the mind/body issue, where he called the Cartesian view the 'official
view' and labelled the mind 'the ghost in the machine'.)
The essential thing for Descartes is that mental reality is not empirical
and therefore not in the world of space. The mind is not located in the body
- it may be related to the body,but it is not some occult alternative
set of physical causes and effects. It is therefore a matter of debate whether
Ryle was justified in calling Descartes' view 'the ghost in the machine',
although a popular form of dualism may well give that impression.
Forms of dualism
Epiphenomenalism This view is that the brain and nervous system are
so complex that they give the impression of individuality and free choice.
Although totally controlled by physical laws, we therefore 'seem' to have
an independent mind. This is the closest that a dualistic view comes to
materialism. The essential thing here is that mind does not influence the
body mind is just the product of the complexity of the body's systems. The
various things that I think, imagine, picture in my mind are epiphenomena.
They arise out of and are caused by the electrical impulses that move between
brain cells, but they are not actually part of that phenomena - they are
'above' (epi-) them.
| Imagine
a robot, programmed by computer. A simple version could be the source
of amusement, as it attempts to mimic human behaviour. But as the memory
capacity of the computer is increased, the process of decision making in
the programme is so complex that the computer takes on a definite character.
In this case the character can be seen to be a product of the computer's
memory- that would be epiphenomenalism (We shall examine artificial intelligence
later in this chapter.) |
Interactionism
Most forms of dualism claim that the mind and the body are distinct but act
upon one another. For example, if you have tooth decay (a bodily phenomenon)
it will lead to pain (a mental experience): the body is affecting the mind.
Equally, if you are suddenly afraid, you can break out in a cold sweat and
start to shake: the mind is affecting the body. Although they interact, the
mind and body remain distinct and appear self-contained. Thus (to take up
the example of the person waving) an interactionist would not say that there
is some break within the series of causes that led to the arm waving. The
physical world remains a closed system within the body, but the whole of
that system is influenced by the mind, and responds to its wishes. But how
exactly is this interaction to come about? Here are some theories:
Occasionalism: On the occasion of my being hit over the
head with a cricket bat, there is a simultaneous but uncaused feeling of
pain! The two systems (physical and mental) do not have a direct causal
connection. The philosopher Malebranche suggested that whenever he wanted
to move his arm, it was actually moved by God.
Pre-established harmony: The physical and mental realms are separate
and independent processes. Each appears to influence the other, but in fact
they are independent but running in harmony. This view was put forward by
Geulinx, a Dutch follower of Descartes. It is also found in Leibniz, who
holds that ultimately everything is divisible again and again until you arrive
at monads - simple entities without extension, and therefore mental. These
monads cannot act upon one another, for each develops according to its own
nature. But a complex being comprises countless monads. How do they all work
together to produce intelligent activity? Leibniz argued that there must
be a pre-established harmony, organising the otherwise independent monads.
As far as humans are concerned, Leibniz holds that there is a dominant monad
(a soul) and that God has established that the other monads that form the
complex person work in harmony with it.
| Note: 'Pre-established harmony' may seem one of the most
bizarre of the mind/body theories, but in Leibniz it has a very specific
purpose, and one which has important implications for both metaphysics and
the philosophy of religion. Leibniz was concerned to preserve the idea of
teleology
(i.e. that the world is organised in a purposeful way) in the face of
the mechanistic science and philosophy of his day. |
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