Consciousness #16 - Speaker Deck

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Consciousness #16

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Seminar 16 1. Recap: the story so far 2. What, then, is a non-physicalist conception of the mind?

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1. Recap: the story so far (a) The general idea of physicalism (b) Scepticism about physicalism (c) Consciousness and qualia (d) Conscious thought

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(a) The general idea of physicalism Everything is physical Everything can be explained in physical terms Everything supervenes on the physical

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The ‘physical’ The subject-matter of physics

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Non-starters and unexamined ideas Eliminative physicalism/materialism? ‘Type’ versus ‘token’ physicalism? Non-reductive physicalism?

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Ontological and explanatory reduction Ontological reduction: identifying (e.g.) the class of mental things as belonging to the class of physical things Explanatory reduction: explaining why one theory is true in terms of the truth of another

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All physicalism is reductive A genuinely physicalist view must be either ontologically reductive or explanatorily reductive or both (NB a controversial claim!)

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Physicalism or emergence? Necessary supervenience without explanatory reduction — is this physicalism or emergence? Why does this matter?

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(b) scepticism about physicalism Why believe in physicalism at all? I claimed: the causal argument (We may return to this next week)

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Some bad other reasons ‘No spooks!’ Science is ‘the measure of all things’ Physicalist ‘intuitions’

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(c) Consciousness and qualia Two ways of using the word ‘qualia’: (1) conscious properties (2) non-intentional, intrinsic (etc.) properties

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Against qualia I reject the claim that the second notion of qualia should play any role in the understanding of consciousness

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(d) Conscious thought How should we understand conscious thought? Thought vs belief States and events

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Intentionality and consciousness Cognitive phenomenology: there is a phenomenology of cognition Phenomenal intentionality: some intentionality is explained in terms of an independently understood notion of phenomenal consciousness

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Intentional object, mode and content Object: what it is the mind is directed on when in an intentional state Modes: the general categories into which mental states fall (e.g. belief, imagination, visual perception etc.) Content: the way in which the object is represented, in a given mode

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Lessons Content is not just propositional content We are not obliged to understand the content of a conscious thought or perception solely in terms of the idea of a proposition Propositions should be thought of as models

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Some attributions (models) are better at describing how the subject’s conscious mind is conﬁgured (what Frege called the subject’s ideas) The facts about how the subject’s conscious mind is conﬁgured are facts about what I call phenomenal content

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Content and ‘vehicle’ For semantic content, there is a distinction between the content (how the world is represented) and the vehicle of the content

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The message and the medium The same content can be represented in different vehicles (e.g. sentences and pictures) The same content in the same vehicle can be realised in different media (e.g. brain and computer)

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Conscious content: a hypothesis For a conscious mental episode, there is no distinction between the vehicle and the content Words going through your mind, images, associations etc. are part of the content

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2. what, then, is a non-physicalist conception of the mind? Two approaches: (i) take the traditional materialism/dualism distinction and defend the dualist side (ii) reject the traditional materialism/dualism distinction

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The traditional distinction Remember substance: Aristotle: natural unities Descartes: that which is capable of independent existence Leibniz: simples (no parts)

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Dualism, materialism, idealism Materialism: there is only material substance Dualism: there is material substance and there are mental substances Idealism: there is only mental substance

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What this presupposes Substance

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But do we formulate our ontology in terms of substance? Which notion of substance? If you do not employ the concept of substance, then how can you formulate the traditional distinction?

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My claim If you reject substance dualism because you reject substance, then you should reject materialism (physicalism) too

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NB this has little to do with ‘matter’ Is everything made of matter? Not according to physics! (Spacetime, forces, ﬁelds, anti-matter etc.)

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Are there other formulations? All objects are physical objects? All properties are physical properties? All processes, events, tropes (etc.) are physical?

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Why believe any of these claims? We should not base our understanding of the mind on half-understood generalisations from contemporary physics Many of those who defend physicalism appeal to physics with a looseness that they would not tolerate in the rest of their philosophical endeavours

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Lesson Forget about trying to investigate the mind by philosophising about physics Back to the things themselves!