apocalyptic visions miniscript Philosophy of Mind SS05 University of Osnabrueck

Florian Halbritter [[email protected]] http://www-lehre.inf.uos.de/˜fhalbrit

July 2, 2005

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Prologue

This document represents my attempt for a summary of the lecture. It is a compilation of the lecture slides and some additional information gained from literature and personal considerations.

I neither claim this overview to be complete nor flawlessly correct. If you notice any mistakes and/or feel an urge to utter any (constructive) criticism, contact me via email at [email protected]

Feel free to distribute this document amongst your friends.

Good luck,

Florian Halbritter

Osnabrueck, July 2, 2005 CONTENTS 3

Contents

1 Introduction 4

2 Theories 5 2.1 Folk Psychology ...... 5 2.2 Semantic Physicalism ...... 6 2.3 Identity Theory ...... 6 2.4 Functionalism ...... 8 2.5 Computational Theory of Mind ...... 9 2.6 Emergentism ...... 10 2.7 Eliminative Materialism ...... 12

3 Levels of Analysis 13

4 Animals and Beliefs 14

5 Phenomenal Qualities 15

6 Emotions 16 4 1 INTRODUCTION

1 Introduction

Methods:

• by ourselves (introspection)

• by others

• by modelling artificial minds

Central topics:

• characteristic features of the mental

• mind-body problem = relation between the mental and the physical

• intentionality and phenomenal consciousness

• emotions

• freedom of will

Typical kinds of questions:

• metaphysics/ontology: Which entities exist (mental ones?)? What is the real nature of an entity x? How do certain entities relate (mind-body)? Do certain entities possess a causal power? Can we reduce mental entities to physical ones?

• epistemology: What is and how can we gain knowledge? What kind of knowledge is accessible to us? Knowledge of our own mind (problem of privileged access) vs. mental states of other people (other minds problem) How can I be sure that other beings experience mental events, too? Can I be even sure about my own ones?

• semantics: What is the meaning and reference of the expression e (i.e. of certain mental concepts)? How do we learn this?

• methodology: What methods are available to study certain phenomena? Do purely philosophical means suffice or do we have to consider e.g. findings from neuroscience, too? 5

– methodological behaviorism – cognitive/computational approach – neuroscientific approach – introspection

2 Theories

2.1 Folk Psychology Folk Psychology = The basic knowledge people have (or think to have) about the mind. Referred to as the basis of the prediction and explanation of behavior in our everyday lives.

Vocabulary: beliefs, desires Advocacy: Jerry Fodor, Aristotle

Predictions and explanations are based upon the assumption of rationality and truthfulness! Reasoning done by some kind of practical syllogism1.

Where does the knowledge of our mind / other people’s minds come from?

• Introspection (Descartes, Wundt, James) introspection = non-inferential access to one’s own mind, first-person mental state ascriptions are incorrigible and infallible

• Methodological (Psychological) Behaviorism (Watson, Skinner) Claim: A correct methodology should be concerned with observable and objective measures (i.e. behavior) →it may not refer to mental states + introspection is an scientifically improper approach BUT: meth.beh. does not state that there are no mental states with a privileged access which may be described in out common-sense con- cepts

• Logical (Philosophical) Behaviorism / Semantic Physicalism (Ryle, Hempel, Carnap) Claim: Beliefs and desires inhering in an unobservable mind do not exist. These terms actually refer to publicly observable events, i.e. in dispositions to behave in a certain way

1desire + belief = action, compare to the classical/ theoretical syllogism: assump- tion/observation1 + a/o2 = conclusion 6 2 THEORIES

→since beliefs and intentions are not internal they cannot be revealed by introspection (cont. in next section)

2.2 Semantic Physicalism Semantic Physicalism = It is possible to define every mental expression in terms of behavioral and physical expressions

Advocacy: Ryle, Hempel, Carnap, Wittgenstein

Focused on the question, how to analyze and understand the vocabulary we use to talk about mental states.

→rules out any kind of dualism or pluralism (’unity of science’) →(Hempel, Carnap:) the meaning of any sentence is captured by observ- able, physical circumstances which verify it (positivist translatability), i.e. anything can be expressed without a loss of content in a physicalist language (translated to and/or defined in terms of) →(Wittgenstein, Ryle:) most philosophical problems are caused by linguis- tic and conceptual confusion and therefore solved by careful analysis

Modern physicalism is behavioristic. Consciousness is either a special type of behavior or a disposition to behave in a certain way.

Objections to Semantic Physicalism:

• infinity of explanation: trying to define mental predicates in a solely physical language is an infinite endeavor

• infinity of qualifications: qualifications themselves entail mental concepts and we therefore run into a cycle

2.3 Identity Theory Identity Theory = Reductive Physicalism or Materialism = Every mental property is identical with some physical property. Every mental predicate denotes a physical predicate.

Advocacy: Place, Smart, Armstrong, Feigl

Preconditions of identification (”A is B”):

• the identity somehow follows from the meanings of A and B 2.3 Identity Theory 7

• the statement can philosophically informative only if it is in same way reductive

• note that the reference of two things can be the same, whereas their sense is not! (cp. the ’morning star’) Arguments pro identity theory:

• Smart: Everything in the world is describable in terms of its physical con- stituents, so why should consciousness be something over and above these? Saying that mental states are correlated to brain processes does not help.

• Kim:

– decrease of the number of entities →improves ontological sim- plicity – can help conceptual or linguistic simplicity, i.e. while men- talistic vocabulary might be indispensable in practice, it does not describe anything but the facts described by a physical language – decrease of the number of lawlike correlations

Arguments contra identity theory:

• Putnam: Pain is not a physicochemical brain state but a functional state of a whole organism. Argument: In order to allow identification, a cross-racially shared brain state for pain had to be determined (and even one for all other mental states), which is extremely unlikely.

– countered by Local Reduction (Kim): The pain of every species can be reduced to a physical property Pi and similarly for other species

• Kripke: Objection in terms of logics in possible worlds. Rigid designators are names that denote the same entities in all these worlds. Propositions are necessarily true, iff they are true in all worlds. Four kinds of truths:

– necessary, a priori (e.g. ’all bachelors are unmarried’) – contingent, a posteriori (e.g. ’ten years ago there was no CogSci program in Osnabrueck’) 8 2 THEORIES

– necessary, a posteriori (e.g. ’Peter Bieri = Pascal Mecieri’) – contingent, a priori (e.g. ’I am now here’)

To make the identity theory true, we require necessary truth. There- fore ’pain’ and ’brain state’ have to be rigid designators. However, we can conceive circumstance under which ’pain’=’brain state’ is not true and these circumstances cannot be explained away as illusions, ergo the identity statement cannot be true.

2.4 Functionalism Functionalism = Mental states are in fact functional states characterized by their causal role (i.e. the relation between inputs and outputs)

Advocacy: Block

Types of functionalism:

• functional analysis (considered with decomposing complex systems into their subcomponents and explaining the working of the whole in terms of the relations amongst these parts)

• computation-representation functionalism (mental processes are decomposed to atomic parts, psychological states represent the world in a language of thought, mental processes are computations using those representations)

• metaphysical functionalism (theory of the nature of mind, con- cerned with what mental states are and not with how they account for behavior) →mental states are inner causes of behavior characterized by

– input clauses – output clauses – interaction clauses

• machine functionalism (computer functionalism) typically referring to some kind of Turing machines (i.e. simple automata that relate inputs via a machine table to other states or to outputs) →rules from the transition table can be mapped to Ramsey sentences of the form ∃x1∃x2TSystem(x, x1, x2). These sentences can be used to define the concept of a System and the functional states.

• causal-role functionalism 2.5 Computational Theory of Mind 9

• functional states as a causal role or as the bearer of that role?

Functionalism stays ontologically neutral (so it does not take a physical- istic side, i.e. it does not say how functional states are realized)

Problems for functionalism:

• strange realizations (Block): We might have an artificial system behaving just like humans do (e.g. by completely mirroring the human brain). Instead of a computer, this simulation might be run by the whole population of China, too. However, this seems very unrealistic...

• how to specify inputs and outputs

• intentionality and the problem of understanding (Searle)

• qualia

– inverted spectrum – absent qualia

2.5 Computational Theory of Mind Intentionality = The power of the mind to be about, to represent or to stand for something

Brentano:

• intentional phenomena are directed towards something different from themselves

• these things have the property of intentional inexistence

• intentionality is the mark of the mental (all and only mental states have intentionality)

Externalism = With regard to mental content, in order to have intentional states it is necessary to be to the environment in a certain way Internalism = Individualism = Having intentional states depends only on intrinsic properties

RTM = Representational Theory of Mind = mental representations are basically symbolic representations holding syntactic and semantic properties CTM = Computational Theory of Mind = Combines RTM with an Computational Account for Reasoning (CAR), i.e. reasoning is a process in 10 2 THEORIES which the causal determinants are the syntactic properties of the symbols in a ’language of thought’ (or ’mentalese’) →formalization allows us to encode semantic properties in syntactically- based derivation rules, allowing to perform semantic inferencing on purely syntactical basis →non-mysterious reasoning as a causal process sensitive to semantic rela- tions Problems: • a mechanism to understand the meanings of mental symbols would re- quire a homunculus (and then the reasoning of the homunculus would have been to understood in turn)

• a reasoning process should meet certain standards of reasoning (such as validity) CTM is a compatibility proof of intentional realism (i.e. reality of semantic properties of mental states, causal roles of mental states in determination of behavior) and the claim that all mental processes are causal processes for which a causal mechanism can be specified →formalization links semantics to syntax, computation links syntax to causal roles

Formal tokens are either... • syntactical and meaningless, but manipulatable according to rules

• semantical and interpreted, with a relation to the outside world →given an interpreted formal system with true axioms and truth-preserving rules, if you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of them- selves

2.6 Emergentism Emergentism = Every mental phenomenon has a physical base. However, some mental phenomena are neither identical with this base nor are they realized by it.

Advocacy: Alexander, Morgan, Sellars, Broad

Emergent phenomena: • phenomenal qualities

• intentionality

• connectionism 2.6 Emergentism 11

• artificial life

• robots

• dynamical systems

• maybe: novelty, unexpectedness, unpredictability, irreducibility, unin- tended or unprogrammed arising

Varieties of emergentism:

• weak emergentism:

– physical monism: entities in our universe are solely physical, emergent properties, dispositions and behaviors are instantiated by solely physical systems – systemic properties: emergent properties are systemic (or col- lective), i.e. a system possesses them, but none of the subparts of it does – synchronic determination: a system’s properties and dispo- sitions depend on its microstructure, there can be no differences between systems without differences in this structure

In cognitive science, e.g. connectionist networks show features which its parts do not possess (rule following, pattern recognition, etc.). Sim- ilar: robots, artificial life Problems:

– cuts nature at one of its joints – there are to many weakly emergent properties

• weak, diachronic emergentism = weak emergentism + novelty (in nature new entities emerge from existing ones again and again)

• synchronic emergentism = weak emergentism + irreducibility A property is irreducible if

– it is not functionally (re-)construable – it cannot be shown that the interactions between a system’s parts fill the role of the systemic properties construed – the behavior of the system’s components does not follow from the component’s behavior in isolation

Properties of connectionist networks, robots, etc. are not synchroni- cally emergent, i.e. they can perfectly well be reductively explained! Problems: 12 2 THEORIES

– cuts nature at one of its joints – qualia might be only horizontally synchronically emergent

• diachronic structure emergentism = weak emergentism + irre- ducibility + novelty + unpredictability Structure unpredictability = rise of novel structures is unpre- dictable if its formation is governed by laws of deterministic chaos →any of its properties in unpredictable

2.7 Eliminative Materialism Eliminativism = Intertheoretic reduction (from mental phenomena to brain states) is impossible, since our common-sense theoretical framework is a radically false and misleading conception of the causes of behavior and the nature of cognitive activity

Advocacy:Churchland, Feyerabend, Rorty

Claims (together with the arguments):

• folk psychology is a theory

– copes pretty well with: explanation and prediction of human be- havior, problem of other minds, nature of introspection, mind- body problem, etc. – mental predicates are perfectly well matching mathematical/logical ones

• folk psychology is fundamentally defective

– folk psychology fails in many aspects (mental illnesses, creativity, memory, learning) – it has been stagnant for the past two thousand years (but what about Freud’s psychoanalysis, etc. ?) – it does not fit into the framework of modern sciences

• thus it will be replaced by future neuroscience (and not reduced!)

• consequently the mental concepts of folk psychology do not refer to anything

Objections (and responses):

• introspection reveals the existence of mental states (response: this might be false, like the impression of a moving celestial sphere) 13

• eliminativism exaggerates the defects of FP

• FP is not strictly a theory, it has a normative character, therefore it is not refutable empirically (response: regularities amongst certain logical relations are not normative)

• FP has a very abstract nature, it makes no reference to an implemen- tation

• social practice would become unintelligible

• we would give up our practice of praise and punishment, etc., there was no more difference between false statements and lies

• psychology, sociology, economics would lose their basis

• ergo: eliminativism is a cognitive suicide (Baker)

3 Levels of Analysis

Tasks:

• analysis (description and explanation) of properties and behaviors of a given system

• prediction of properties and behaviors of a given system

• therapeutic change of unhealthy properties and behaviors of a given system

• construction of systems with certain properties and behaviors

Which stances are appropriate to take for theses tasks?

Dennett’s stances:

• intentional stance: explain and predict in intentional terms (beliefs, desires)

– systems are intentional only with regard to the strategies with which we are trying to understand it – the intentional stance is useful whenever we have reason to belief in an optimal design and when others stances fail

• design stance: explain and predict in terms of design (program)

• physical stance: explain and predict on the basis of physical states

Behavioral examples: 14 4 ANIMALS AND BELIEFS

• normal behavior

• panic attacks (person act irrationally →might be hard to predict, how to cure it?)

• weakness of will (although there is the desire to act in some way, the outcome might be different)

• obsessive behavior (maybe predictable, but how to cure it?)

Levels of analysis according to Marr:

• Computational level (which function does the system perform?)

• Representational and algorithmic level (by which procedures is the function fulfilled?)

• Implementational level (which physical mechanisms carry out these functions?)

4 Animals and Beliefs

Davidson’s ’Muenchhausen’ Theory of Beliefs Requirements for genuine beliefs and their bearers:

• each attribution of a propositional attitude produces an intensional context

• only systems that have the concept of belief can have beliefs and other propositional attitudes (having the concept of something is more than just being able to discriminate it from other things)

We have adequate vocabularies for describing intentional and for mindless systems, but not for those in between!

Criteria for having concepts (Collin Allen):

• successful discrimination between instances of the concept and those of other concepts

• recognize own error in discrimination

• learning of better discrimination

→recognition of poisonous bug by a predator yields the idea that it believes that it is not a good idea to eat it →animals meeting Allen’s criteria are somehow in between intentional and non-intentional beings 15

5 Phenomenal Qualities

Leibnitz’ Intuition: We might imagine a machine thinking, feeling and perceiving just like hu- mans do, but within the mechanics of this machine we would not be able to find the basis for perception. Therefrom Leibnitz concluded that there had to be some substance responsible for perception.

Broad’s Gedankenexperiment: Is there any limit to the deductive explanation of the properties of chemical elements? Suppose an archangel capable of complete mathematics, chem- istry, physics and so forth. The archangel would still fail to deduce the characteristic smell of a substance from its physical basis. →similar idea: Feigl’s perfume

The ’Feigl-program’:

• find neural correlates for all kinds of phenomenal states

• find laws that connect neural states with locations in a vector space of phenomenal dimensions

• predict from the neural state the location of novel experiences in this phenomenal feature space

→if we succeed in this, phenomenal qualities are correlated to physical ones, but for philosophy this does not suffice, since we want to have reductive ex- planations

Locke’s inverted spectrum: Assuming that one person perceived colors in another way than we do, we could never tell! →the same would hold for inverted qualia. Causal roles are preserved!

(Philosophical) Zombies = exact copies of humans without any qualia at all

Jackson’s Mary Gedankenexperiment: Mary is a brilliant scientist observing the world from an isolated room via black/white-screens. She can access any information she wants about color perception, but nevertheless she will never know what it is like to see colors until she is released from her imprisonment. Consequently physicalism is false.

Problems with phenomenal qualities: 16 6 EMOTIONS

1. the problem with phenomenal qualities is the question whether they can be explained reductively

2. therefore we needed either conceptual reconstruction (causal roles) or reference to general composition laws

3. phenomenal qualities resist both approaches →phenomenal qualities do not fulfill any causal roles themselves

Options:

• accept all claims, take phenomenal qualities as emergent

• reject claim 3, optimistically, try to find adequate conceptual recon- struals for qualia

• reject claim 1, qualia can be reduced without reductive explanations

• reject claim 2, try to explain qualia reductively without reconstruing them via their causal role

6 Emotions

Descriptive properties of emotions:

• content: intentional directedness towards some certain kind of situa- tion

• phenomenology: all that is ’going on inside you’ when you experi- ence this emotion

• valence: either positive, negative or neutral

Tasks for the philosophy of emotions:

• define what emotions are and what they are good for

• describe what emotions are like

• explain, reconstruct and critically assess emotions

• integrate them into our current theories

Emotions give rise to doubts about the usual distinction between intention- ality and qualia.

Shifting perspective from mind to life as an active endeavor of trying to improve your personal well-being, allows to... 17

• view emotions as paradigm cases of intentional states (they carry in- formation about oneself and the world) • give relevance to emotions as bearers of important functional roles (they motivate us to act) • to get a better grip on the topics of intentionality and consciousness Affective phenomena: • sensations: non-intentional bodily feelings • emotions: complex intentional states – simple emotions (fear, happiness, sorrow, etc.) – complex emotions (envy, compassion, jealousy, etc.) • moods: general affective states, not directed at certain objects/events/situations Basic questions: • defining features of emotions generally: intentionality, mental-cum- bodily processes, involving sensations, bodily changes, action sequences, passivity, hedonic valence, motivation • defining features of particular types of emotions? • what is the relation between emotion and reason? • what do we learn by emotions? • emotions and words? Some theories of emotion: • Feeling theories: Defining feature of emotions is their felt quality, which are complex bodily sensations Problem: sensations are by far to unspecific, distinctions amongst emotions at least require reference to their formal objects • Functional role theories: Emotions fulfill a functional role, namely they serve the task to initiate responses to environmental events • Cognitive theories: Emotions are distinguished by their formal objects. Ergo, emotions are evaluative judgements. • Solomon’s theory: Relationship between reason and emotion is one of mutual inclusion →reasoning requires emotions and vice versa