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Arguing About the Mind (Arguing About Philosophy)
Arguing About the Mind is an accessible, engaging introduction to the core questions in the philosophy of mind. This collection offers a selection of thought-provoking articles that examine a broad range of issues from the mind and body relation to animal and artificial intelligence. Topics addressed the problem of consciousness the nature of the mind the relationship between the mind, body and world the notion of selfhood pathologies and behavioural problems animal, machine and extra-terrestrial intelligence. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section and give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers. An original and stimulating reader, it is ideal for students new to the philosophy of mind.
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First published June 22, 2007
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About the author
Brie Gertler
6 books12 followersBrie Gertler is a philosopher who works primarily on problems in the philosophy of the mind. A mind-body dualist, she is presently a teaching associate professor at the University of Virginia. Her special interests include introspection, consciousness and mental content.
Among Gertler's other fields of study are epistemology and the philosophy of language. She has written a book, Privileged Access (2003), is editor of the "Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science" section of the Philosophy Compass and co-directs the Philosophy Research Network.
Among Gertler's other fields of study are epistemology and the philosophy of language. She has written a book, Privileged Access (2003), is editor of the "Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science" section of the Philosophy Compass and co-directs the Philosophy Research Network.
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February 14, 2022210 What is the self? (by the editors)
Dennett claims the self is indeterminate, that it is a fictional character. Each of us creates a personal narrative of our lives; this changes with time as we rewrite our own histories in the light of new experiences. The upshot is an autobiography that creates the self, rather than reflecting an independently existing self.
Eric Olson argues that philosophers should put aside questions about what constitutes selfhood, and abandon the term ‘self’. For, he claims, there is no univocal, shared notion of self that competing accounts aim to capture. There are no paradigm cases of a self, cases which all theorists agree are our selves; nor are there widely accepted characteristic features of selves.
Olson believes one should distinguish between a human being and a self to clear up confusion in debates.
Derek Parfit. Divided minds and the nature of persons (from Mindwaves, 1987 Ed Blakemore and Greenfield).
231. In a sense a bundle theorist denies the existence of persons. An outright denial is of course absurd. As Reid protested in the eighteenth century, ‘I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something which thinks and acts and feels’. I am not a series of events but a person. A Bundle Theorist admits this but claims it to be only a fact about our grammar, our language. If persons are believed to be more than this – separately existing beings, distinct from our brains and bodies, and the various kinds of mental states – the Bundle Theorist denies there are such things.
The first Bundle Theorist was Buddha, who taught anatta, or the No Self view. Buddhists concede that selves or persons have ‘nominal existence’, by which they mean that persons are merely combinations of other elements. Only what exists by itself has what Buddhists call ‘actual existence’.
Quotes from Buddhist texts:
a) The king asks the monk his name, and receives the reply: Sir I am known as Nagasena. It is just an appellation, a form of speech, a description, a conventional usage. Nagasena is only a name, for no person is found here.
b) Buddha has spoken thus: Actions do exist, but the person that acts does not. There exists no individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.
Buddha’s claims are strikingly similar to the claims advanced by several Western writers. Since these writers knew nothing of Buddha, the similarity suggests they are not merely part of one cultural tradition, in one period. They may be, as I believe they are, true.
Most of us have false beliefs about what persons are, and about ourselves.
Daniel Dennett. The self as a centre of narrative gravity
241. We can maintain that the robot’s computer really knows nothing about the world. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. (The same is just as true of your brain; it doesn’t know what it’s doing either.)
244. According to Julian Jaynes (Origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind) one of our early ancestors asked a question when there was nobody else around. This stimulated him, cooperatively to think of an answer, and the answer came to him. He had established a communication link between 2 parts of his brain. One component of the mind had confronted a problem that another component could solve. What a discovery! Sometimes talking and listening to yourself can have wonderful effects, not otherwise obtainable. The hypothesis is that the modules of the mind have different capacities and ways of doing things, and are not perfectly interaccessible.
Conscious thinking seems – much of it – to be talking to oneself.
The supposition that we are not the captains of our ships; there is no conscious self that is unproblematically in command of the mind’s resources. Rather, we are somewhat disunified.
Galen Strawson. Against narrative
251. I’ll use I* to represent that which I experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself as an inner mental presence or self. This comes with a large family of cognate forms – me, my, oneself etc.
Alasdair MacIntyre: ‘the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man’.
255. The Earl of Shaftesbury (1698) Philosophical Regimen: Some say that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. But what matter for memory. What have I to do with that part. If, whilst I am, I am as I should be, what do I care more? And thus me lose self every hour, and be 20 successive selfs, or new selfs, ‘tis all one to me: so long as I lose not my opinion (i.e. my overall outlook, my character). If I carry that woth me ‘tis I; all is well…The now; the now. Mind this: in this is all.
255. I suspect that those who are drawn to write on narrativity tend to have strongly narrative outlooks or personalities, and generalise from their own case with that special, misplaced confidence that people feel when, considering elements of their own experience that are fundamental for them, they make it that they must also be fundamental for everybody else.
Gordon Tait. Free will, moral responsibility and ADHD
357. Spinoza in the 17th century was a determinist. He compares the free with metaphorically enslaved by contrasting the degree of understanding they possess of themselves, their situation and the world in which they act. His argument is similar to that of the famous quote by Peter Berger (1963, An invitation to sociology, p. 199) where we are likened to puppets, only with the possibility of ‘looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom’.
BF Skinner, in his seminal text Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) contends that freedom is a myth, and that the sum total of human experience is simply a set of conditioned responses to given stimuli. He stated that there is no reason why the cause/effect nexus that underpins all of the natural sciences, should not have an exact correlate of stimulus/response in the social sciences. The sensation of free will, and hence freedom itself, is simply a conditioned response.
357. The final paragraph of John Searle’s ‘Freedom of the will’(1994):
For reasons I don’t really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary human behaviour.
360. John Hospers in ‘Human beings as controlled puppets’ (1994) adopts a psychoanalytic approach, arguing that our conscious minds – the ‘sanctum sanctorum of freedom’, and the only parts of our ‘selves’ which can logically ne held accountable for anything – is not the driving force behind our choices or our conduct. Rather, the unconscious mind is responsible for how we act: “the unconscious is the master of every fate and the captain of every soul”.
Dennett claims the self is indeterminate, that it is a fictional character. Each of us creates a personal narrative of our lives; this changes with time as we rewrite our own histories in the light of new experiences. The upshot is an autobiography that creates the self, rather than reflecting an independently existing self.
Eric Olson argues that philosophers should put aside questions about what constitutes selfhood, and abandon the term ‘self’. For, he claims, there is no univocal, shared notion of self that competing accounts aim to capture. There are no paradigm cases of a self, cases which all theorists agree are our selves; nor are there widely accepted characteristic features of selves.
Olson believes one should distinguish between a human being and a self to clear up confusion in debates.
Derek Parfit. Divided minds and the nature of persons (from Mindwaves, 1987 Ed Blakemore and Greenfield).
231. In a sense a bundle theorist denies the existence of persons. An outright denial is of course absurd. As Reid protested in the eighteenth century, ‘I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something which thinks and acts and feels’. I am not a series of events but a person. A Bundle Theorist admits this but claims it to be only a fact about our grammar, our language. If persons are believed to be more than this – separately existing beings, distinct from our brains and bodies, and the various kinds of mental states – the Bundle Theorist denies there are such things.
The first Bundle Theorist was Buddha, who taught anatta, or the No Self view. Buddhists concede that selves or persons have ‘nominal existence’, by which they mean that persons are merely combinations of other elements. Only what exists by itself has what Buddhists call ‘actual existence’.
Quotes from Buddhist texts:
a) The king asks the monk his name, and receives the reply: Sir I am known as Nagasena. It is just an appellation, a form of speech, a description, a conventional usage. Nagasena is only a name, for no person is found here.
b) Buddha has spoken thus: Actions do exist, but the person that acts does not. There exists no individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.
Buddha’s claims are strikingly similar to the claims advanced by several Western writers. Since these writers knew nothing of Buddha, the similarity suggests they are not merely part of one cultural tradition, in one period. They may be, as I believe they are, true.
Most of us have false beliefs about what persons are, and about ourselves.
Daniel Dennett. The self as a centre of narrative gravity
241. We can maintain that the robot’s computer really knows nothing about the world. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. (The same is just as true of your brain; it doesn’t know what it’s doing either.)
244. According to Julian Jaynes (Origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind) one of our early ancestors asked a question when there was nobody else around. This stimulated him, cooperatively to think of an answer, and the answer came to him. He had established a communication link between 2 parts of his brain. One component of the mind had confronted a problem that another component could solve. What a discovery! Sometimes talking and listening to yourself can have wonderful effects, not otherwise obtainable. The hypothesis is that the modules of the mind have different capacities and ways of doing things, and are not perfectly interaccessible.
Conscious thinking seems – much of it – to be talking to oneself.
The supposition that we are not the captains of our ships; there is no conscious self that is unproblematically in command of the mind’s resources. Rather, we are somewhat disunified.
Galen Strawson. Against narrative
251. I’ll use I* to represent that which I experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself as an inner mental presence or self. This comes with a large family of cognate forms – me, my, oneself etc.
Alasdair MacIntyre: ‘the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man’.
255. The Earl of Shaftesbury (1698) Philosophical Regimen: Some say that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. But what matter for memory. What have I to do with that part. If, whilst I am, I am as I should be, what do I care more? And thus me lose self every hour, and be 20 successive selfs, or new selfs, ‘tis all one to me: so long as I lose not my opinion (i.e. my overall outlook, my character). If I carry that woth me ‘tis I; all is well…The now; the now. Mind this: in this is all.
255. I suspect that those who are drawn to write on narrativity tend to have strongly narrative outlooks or personalities, and generalise from their own case with that special, misplaced confidence that people feel when, considering elements of their own experience that are fundamental for them, they make it that they must also be fundamental for everybody else.
Gordon Tait. Free will, moral responsibility and ADHD
357. Spinoza in the 17th century was a determinist. He compares the free with metaphorically enslaved by contrasting the degree of understanding they possess of themselves, their situation and the world in which they act. His argument is similar to that of the famous quote by Peter Berger (1963, An invitation to sociology, p. 199) where we are likened to puppets, only with the possibility of ‘looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom’.
BF Skinner, in his seminal text Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) contends that freedom is a myth, and that the sum total of human experience is simply a set of conditioned responses to given stimuli. He stated that there is no reason why the cause/effect nexus that underpins all of the natural sciences, should not have an exact correlate of stimulus/response in the social sciences. The sensation of free will, and hence freedom itself, is simply a conditioned response.
357. The final paragraph of John Searle’s ‘Freedom of the will’(1994):
For reasons I don’t really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary human behaviour.
360. John Hospers in ‘Human beings as controlled puppets’ (1994) adopts a psychoanalytic approach, arguing that our conscious minds – the ‘sanctum sanctorum of freedom’, and the only parts of our ‘selves’ which can logically ne held accountable for anything – is not the driving force behind our choices or our conduct. Rather, the unconscious mind is responsible for how we act: “the unconscious is the master of every fate and the captain of every soul”.
April 6, 2009
This is a good but not great selection of articles in the philosophy of mind. What makes this book good is that the articles are generally interesting and clear. What keeps it from being great is a focus on topics on the fringe of philosophy of mind by authors who are also on the fringe.
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