This Is Philosophy of Mind

How to Use This Book xv Acknowledgments xvii About the Companion Website xix 1 Meet Your Mind 1 Aspects of Mind 1 Thought and experience 1 Conscious and unconscious 2 Qualia 3 Sensory perception 3 Emotion 4 Imagery 4 Will and action 5 Self 5 Propositional attitudes 5 Philosophical Problems 6 Mind–body problem 6 Other problems 9 Conclusion 14 Annotated Bibliography 14 2 Substance Dualism 15 Arguments for Substance Dualism 15 Leibniz’s law arguments 16 Criticism of Leibniz’s law arguments: Intensional fallacy 19 Explanatory gap arguments 20 Criticisms of explanatory gap arguments 21 Modal arguments 22 Mind–Body Interaction as a Problem for Substance Dualism 24 Princess Elisabeth’s objection 25 The dualistic alternatives to Cartesian interactionism 26 Conclusion 27 Annotated Bibliography 28 3 Property Dualism 29 Introducing Property Dualism: Qualia and the Brain 29 The Inverted Spectrum 30 Attack of the Zombies 32 The Knowledge Argument 34 The Explanatory Gap Argument 37 Does Property Dualism Lead to Epiphenomenalism? 39 How Do You Know You’re Not a Zombie? 40 Conclusion 42 Annotated Bibliography 42 4 Idealism, Solipsism, and Panpsychism 44 Solipsism: Is It Just Me? 45 Idealism: It’s All in the Mind 49 Berkeley’s argument from pain 50 Berkeley’s argument from perceptual relativity: Berkeley’s bucket 51 Berkeley’s “Nothing but an idea can resemble an idea” 51 Berkeley’s master argument 52 Why Berkeley is not a solipsist 52 Arguing against idealism 53 Panpsychism: Mind Is Everywhere 53 The analogy argument 54 The nothing from nothing argument 55 The evolutionary argument 56 Arguing against panpsychism: The combination problem 57 Conclusion 58 Annotated Bibliography 58 5 Behaviorism and Other Minds 59 Behaviorism: Introduction and Overview 59 The History of Behaviorism 61 Ludwig Wittgenstein and the private language argument 62 Gilbert Ryle versus the ghost in the machine 64 Objections to Behaviorism 65 The qualia objection 65 Sellars’s objection 66 The Geach–Chisholm objection 67 The Philosophical Problem of Other Minds 68 The rise and fall of the argument from analogy 69 Denying the asymmetry between self- knowledge and knowledge of other minds 70 Conclusion 71 Annotated Bibliography 72 6 Mind as Brain 74 Introducing Mind–Brain Identity Theory 74 Advantages of Mind–Brain Identity Theory 75 A Very Brief Overview of Neuroscience 76 Major parts and functions of the nervous system 77 Major parts and functions of the brain 77 Neurons, neural activations, and brain states 78 Lesions, imaging, and electrophysiology 78 Localism and holism 78 Learning and synaptic plasticity 79 Computational neuroscience and connectionism 79 Neural correlates of consciousness 80 On pain and c- fibers 80 Some General Remarks about Identity 81 Arguments against Mind–Brain Identity Theory 83 The zombie argument 83 The multiple realizability argument 84 Max Black’s “distinct property” argument 86 Conclusion 87 Annotated Bibliography 88 7 Thinking Machines 89 Can a Machine Think? 89 Alan Turing, Turing Machines, and the Turing Test 90 Alan Turing 91 Turing machines 91 The Turing test 92 Searle’s Chinese Room Argument 93 Responses to the Chinese Room Argument 94 The Silicon Chip Replacement Thought Experiment 95 Symbolicism versus Connectionism 98 Conclusion 101 Annotated Bibliography 102 8 Functionalism 104 The Gist of Functionalism 104 A Brief History of Functionalism 106 Arguments for Functionalism 107 The causal argument 107 The multiple realization argument 109 The Varieties of Functionalism 111 Turing machine functionalism 112 Analytical functionalism versus empirical functionalism 113 Arguments against Functionalism 114 Adapting the zombie argument to be against functionalism 114 Adapting the Chinese room argument to be against functionalism 115 Conclusion 116 Annotated Bibliography 116 9 Mental Causation 118 The Problem of Mental Causation 118 The causal closure of the physical 119 The problem for substance dualists 121 The problem for property dualists 121 Basic Views of Interaction 122 Interactionism 122 Parallelism 123 Epiphenomenalism 124 Reductionism 125 Qualia and Epiphenomenalism 125 Whether qualia- based epiphenomenalism conflicts with phenomenal self- knowledge 126 Dennett’s zimboes 126 Anomalous Monism 127 The Explanatory Exclusion Argument 131 Conclusion 132 Annotated Bibliography 132 10 Eliminative Materialism 134 Introduction and Overview 134 Basic Ingredients of Contemporary Eliminative Materialism 135 Folk psychology as a theory 136 The contrast between reduction and elimination 137 Putting the ingredients together 138 Arguments for Propositional Attitude Eliminative Materialism 138 Folk psychology is a stagnant research program 139 Folk psychology is committed to propositional attitudes having a sentential structure that is unsupported by neuroscientific research 139 Folk psychology makes commitments to features of mental states that lead to an unacceptable epiphenomenalism 140 Arguments against Propositional Attitude Eliminative Materialism 140 Eliminative materialism is self- refuting 140 The “theory” theory is false 141 Folk psychology is indispensable 142 Introspection reveals the existence of propositional attitudes 142 Qualia Eliminative Materialism: “Quining” Qualia 143 Conclusion 147 Annotated Bibliography 147 11 Perception, Mental Imagery, and Emotion 149 Perception 149 Direct realism and the argument from illusion 149 Philosophical theories of perception 152 Mental Imagery 155 How similar are mental images to other mental states? 156 Is mental imagery the basis for mental states such as thoughts? 157 To what degree, if any, is mental imagery genuinely imagistic or picture-like? 157 Emotion 159 What distinguishes emotions from other mental states? 160 What distinguishes different emotions from each other? 160 The difficulties in giving a unified account of the emotions 161 Conclusion 162 Annotated Bibliography 162 12 The Will: Willpower and Freedom 164 The Problem of Free Will and Determinism 164 Sources of Determinism 166 General remarks 166 Physical determinism 167 Theological determinism 168 Logical determinism 168 Ethical determinism 169 Psychological determinism 169 Compatibilism 169 Incompatibilism 171 The origination or causal chain argument 172 The consequence argument 172 What Might Free Will Be, If There Were Any Such Thing? 173 Freedom aside for the moment, what is the will? 173 What might the freedom of the will consist in? 176 Conclusion 177 Annotated Bibliography 178 13 Intentionality and Mental Representation 179 Introducing Intentionality 179 The Inconsistent Triad of Intentionality 180 Defending each individual proposition 181 Spelling out the inconsistency 182 Internalism versus Externalism 182 For externalism: The Twin Earth thought experiment 184 Against externalism: Swampman and the brain in the vat 185 Theories of Content Determination 186 Resemblance theory 186 Interpretational semantics 187 Conceptual role semantics 188 Causal or informational theory 190 Teleological evolutionary theory 191 Conclusion 192 Annotated Bibliography 192 14 Consciousness and Qualia 194 Optimism about Explaining Consciousness 194 Focusing on Several Different Uses of the Word “Conscious” 195 Creature consciousness 195 Transitive consciousness 195 State consciousness 196 Phenomenal consciousness 196 Rosenthal’s Higher Order Thought Theory of Consciousness 197 An objection to the HOT theory: Introspectively implausible 200 Another objection to the HOT theory: Too intellectual 200 First Order Representation Theories of Consciousness 202 The transparency argument for first order representationalism 204 The “Spot” argument for first order representationalism 205 Conclusion 205 Annotated Bibliography 206 15 Is This the End?: Personal Identity, the Self, and Life after Death 207 Problems of Personal Identity 207 The Problem of Persistence 209 Approaches to the Problem of Persistence 209 The psychological approach 210 The fission problem for the psychological approach 211 The somatic or bodily approach 212 Temporal parts theory aka perdurantism aka four- dimensionalism 214 The no- self view 215 Life after Death 217 Substance dualism and the afterlife 218 Mind–brain identity theory and the afterlife 218 Functionalism and the afterlife 219 Temporal parts and the afterlife 219 No- self and the afterlife 220 Conclusion 220 Annotated Bibliography 220 16 The 4E Approach 222 Two Dimensions of Difference 223 The spatial dimension: From in here to out there 223 The causation- constitution dimension: Important to the mind vs. part of the mind 224 The First E: Mind as Embodied 225 Embodiment and thinking 225 Embodiment and memory 226 Embodiment and conscious experience 227 Embodiment and the plasticity of sensory systems 228 Spatial concepts and bodily orientation 229 The coupling- constitution fallacy 230 The Second E: Enactive 230 You’ve got to move 231 Sensorimotor contingencies 232 Enactivism and anti- representationalism 233 In a World: The Third and Fourth Es 235 Annotated Bibliography 235 17 Futuristic Directions 237 Super AI and the Technological Singularity 238 Chalmers’ singularity argument 240 The gist of Chalmers argument is 240 The quest for friendly AI 241 Enhanced Humans and Posthumans 243 Cyborgization and bioengineering 244 Technology and the extended mind 245 Posthumans versus natural- born cyborgs 246 Mind Uploading 247 Arguing for uploading 248 Annotated Bibliography 250 Index 252