Danger. 35 hundred words of philosophizing headed your way. I’m going to discuss the relationship between two philosophical issues: the mind-body problem on the one hand, and the existence of a God (in a sense that we will try to limn out as we move along) on the other. My point? We can understand the relationship between mind and body as quite analogous to the relationship between God and cosmos. Furthermore, this parallel applies to, and helps us understand, a wide range of views about what the mind is. The mind-body problem, as I understand it, breaks down into at least three parts. First, is it feasible to describe human behavior fully in physicalist/mechanical terms? Second, if it is NOT feasible, and we add another element to the description of humanity which we call ‘mind’ -- how should we conceive of that second element? Third, if we do add this extra element, do we believe that mind and body interact? How are we to understand THAT? These three inquirie...
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I've decided I don't believe in Descartes' presentation. In less kind language: he was a phony. He marketed as someone who went through a skeptical dark night of the soul, took seriously arguments about the malevolent demon and dreams, thought himself out to the other aside of such arguments, (by finding God), and so was able to provide us with a distinctive view of the world. The dark-night-of-the-soul stuff has so come to dominate the collective imagination that it overshadows the distinct view of the world that Descartes eventually offered. What he offered was this: 1. There are three substances: God, mind, and matter. We need God chiefly as the guarantor of our knowledge about matter: "we" are manifestation of mind. 2. How does mind interact with matter? Descartes left that as a mystery -- but he minimized the extent of the mystery a bit by telling us that other animals are mindless: the issue only arises for humans. 2. Matter is in essence the s...
What is connectionism? is it something of the past or of the future? Connectionism, in the words of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is "an approach to the study of human cognition that utilizes mathematical models, known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks. Often, these come in the form of highly interconnected, neuron-like processing units." I have mentioned it before in this blog, but only in passing. The point is to abstract from the actual functioning of the human brain to study a hypothetical brain that humans can model, in the way that a planetarium may suffice when the night sky is obscure. The IEP suggests that connectionism had a "heyday," in the late 20th century, but that the heyday is now past. This doesn't mean the approach turned out to be a dead end. Quite the contrary, IEP says that the idea has passed its heyday (few scientists call themselves by the label anymore) because its central insights have been ...
Do we have direct introspective access into our own minds, or (if you believe in distinguishing, say, between ego and id) into some portion of our own minds? In The Opacity of Mind (2011), Peter Carruthers offered a "no," answer, along with an explanation of why we think we do. Carruthers argues that natural selection has bred into us an ability to read each other's minds. My ability to infer that an acquaintance is angry at me, and perhaps scheming up an ambush to kill me, is of obvious survival significance, and the gene lines that led to such an ability were naturally the ones that account for our dedicated mental subsystem for understanding one another. This system involves observations of behavior, facial expressions, tones of voice, etc. The SAME system, which of course relies upon behavior, facial expressions, etc., is also responsible for our understanding of our selves, Carruthers submits. There is no "inner sense" to it, though the subsyste...