Lecture 12-13 Materialists' Conception of Mind and Mind-Body Identity About the Lecture: Materialism argues against the above Cartesian conception of mind. The Cartesian conception of the reality divides the mind and the body into two different realms of existence. The materialists try to bring in the scientific hypothesis that ‘consciousness is a brain processes and maintains that there is nothing mystical about the notion of mind. Behaviourism, Physicalism, and Functionalism are in general maintained that consciousness is not ontologically real. Rather, the matter is fundamental for the study of consciousness. The consciousness or the mind is potentially embedded in the body or causally related to the function of the brain. Keywords: Materialism, Behaviourism, Physicalism, Mind-Body Identity, Consciousness as Brain Process, Phenomenological Fallacy, Disposition, Manifestation, Central-State Identity, Epiphenomenon Materialism argues against the above Cartesian conception of mind. The Cartesian conception of the reality divides the mind and the body into two different realms of existence. And insofar as consciousness is concerned, it is the metaphysical foundation for the scientific as well as commonsensical explanation of the mental phenomena. Materialism as an alternative conception of mind explains the reality of the mental through the reality of the physical. The concept of body is defined inter terms extension. The body exists as an independent substance. Its existence does not depend on the existence of the mind. Thomas Hobbes has initiated the study of the mechanical function of the body. According to him “The body is also called the ‘subject’, because it is so placed in and subjected to imaginary space, that it may be understood by reason, perceived by senses.” 1 The body as a subject for the discourse of experience and action necessitates a separate ontological status. In this regard, Hobbes was interested in studying the causal function of the body. The function of the body is an accident – ‘an accident is that faculty of any body by which it works in us a conception of itself.’2 For him, the conception of the body is such that it has the power to bring out certain effects. So the production of effect presupposes 1 (Copleston 1994: 24) 2 Ibid., p.21 1 the causal power of the body. ‘If body A generates motion in body B, A is the agent and B is the patient. Thus, if fire warms my hand then fire is the agent and the hand is the patient.’3 The agent-patient relationship shows the active and passive power of the body so far as the change of events is concerned. So far as human beings are concerned, there are two kinds of events; the mental events and the physical events. For the materialist, the mental events are causally connected to the bodily/ physical events of the body. In other words, the mind is just a part of the physical organism. The function of the organic system would unfold the causal relationship existing in the system and causing action. In this regard, the mind can be known through the various activities of the body/ the brain, i.e., it involves the physical behaviour of the brain comprising of the different states and events that are occurring in the brain. Hence there is no dualism between the mental and the physical. Materialism includes various theories of the mind like behaviourism, physicalism and functionalism. All these theories talk about some sort of identity relationship between the mental phenomena and the neurophysiological states and processes of the brain. Behaviourism, as a theory of mind, advocates the empirical study of the mind through behaviour. As Churchland puts it, "By 'behaviour', behaviourists' mean the publicly observable, measureable, recordable activity of the subjects at issue: bodily movements, noises emitted, temperature changes, chemical released, interaction with environment, and so forth."4 It is the behaviour which is the source of our knowledge of the mind. Rather mind, as such, is nothing but the behaviour itself. We do not, therefore, observe the mental phenomena. It is basically the behaviour which is observed. And this observable behaviour is to be taken into account in order to explain the mental phenomena. In this sense, the definition of the behaviour of human beings includes both voluntary or conscious actions as well as involuntary or unconscious actions. Voluntary action includes the person's intention and will, whereas the involuntary actions exclude the persons’ intention and desires. It includes the biological actions of the body. The behaviour is studied by undertaking both the outer environmental conditions as well as the inner potential capacities of human beings. As Churchland puts it, "Instead of appealing to mental states, behaviourists proposed to 3 Ibid. 4 Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1989, p.88. (Henceforth MC) 2 explain any organism's behaviour in terms of its peculiar environmental circumstance. Or, in terms of environment plus certain observable features of the organism. Or, in terms of certain unobservable features of the organismdispositions, and innate and conditioned features meet a very strict condition: they must be such that their presence or absence could always be decisively determined by behavioural test, as solubility of sugar is revealed by its actually dissolving (the behaviour) when placed in water (the environmental circumstances)."5 Insofar as the mental state is concerned, there are two aspects which count mostly for explaining the mind: they are the dispositional capacity as an intrinsic feature of the human beings' organic structure and the environmental condition as an outer condition in which a person is being situated. Environment is an external condition which has a direct impact on human behaviour. Behaviourism as a philosophical thesis reasonably motivated to critique dualism. Gilbert Ryle’s response to Descartes’ substance dualism is a famous example of philosophical behaviourism. Ryle’s philosophical behaviourism is stirred by the development of philosophical thesis of logical positivism and the ‘general assumption of analytic philosophy that philosophical problems arise due to linguistic or conceptual confusions which can be dissolved by a careful analysis of language. The logical positivists emphasized that ‘meaning of the sentences is determined by the observable circumstances.’ Human behaviours are external observable facts. As the expressions of the mind, behaviours are public state of affairs. Descartes’ conceptualization of the mind is a private phenomenon and does not exist in space. And it can be known through introspection was something problematic for Ryle. According to Ryle, the very division that Descartes draws between the mind and the body is the reason for creating substance dualism. Descartes commits a kind of category mistake by conceptually categorizing the mind and the body as two different substances. To place mind as a substance within the framework of the body is to conceptualize the existence of the mind in a dogmatic way. Ryle calls it ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine.’ The body is conceptualized as an organic system that causally operates like a machine; to say that the mind or the soul resides in the centre of pineal gland and controls the bodily movements while performing voluntary actions, but the intervention of the mind not an observable fact. Rather, it is directly and immediately accessible itself. In other words, the soul is self-conscious – it is conscious and is aware of its existence. To explain consciousness with the help of consciousness is to commit the fallacy of circularity. The 5 Ibid., pp.88-89. 3 Cartesian explanation of the mind is thus a problematic thesis does not go along with the scientific discovery of the fact that there is a causal-mechanical process through which body operates. The behaviourists give importance to the study of actual and the potential pattern of the behavior. Emotion, belief, desire are not about ‘ghostly inner episodes’, rather they are observable when expressed in behaviours. For instance, desire to feel thirsty is a potential dispositional state of the living body. To quench the thirst, when someone looks for water or any kind of drinks implies state of belief. Ryle and other behaviourists talk about multi-track dispositions. The inner feature of behavioural capacity is known as the dispositional property of behaviour. The disposition is an unobservable factor which gets manifested in the behaviour itself. For example, brittleness is the dispositional property of glassware. Glass, being a physical phenomenon, contains brittleness as its physical dispositional property. Similarly, human beings' behaviour is determined basically by the dispositional feature of the brain or brain states. That is, for all of our outer physical behaviour there must be a causal dispositional state in the brain. Dispositions are thus built into the structure of an object. For example, whenever any glassware falls from my hand or is hit heavily, it lies broken on the ground. The brittleness is a part of the atomic structure of each piece of the broken glass. It is also true that there is some external factor operating for causing the glass to slip from my grip. The disposition of the glass is simply that if breaks whenever it falls to the ground. Similarly, in certain environmental and physical conditions human beings behave in a particular order. Hence, in order to determine the human dispositions we must observe or measure the particular order of the external behaviour of the human beings. Besides in the case of human behaviour, we must observe the dispositional features of the brain states. Brain states, for the behaviourists, are the physical states. Behaviour is identified with the brain states, i.e. corresponding to a particular behaviour there must be a dispositional state in the brain organism. We generalize about dispositions by seeing the constant occurrence of the same type of behaviour in typical external condition.