Mental States and Science
What can science tell us about mental states?
For one, it can tell us that mental states are related to what’s going on in the physical states of the brain. For instance if your brain is denied oxygen, say, from a cardiac arrest, you may go into a vegetative state and lose consciousness (this may have been what happened to to-warmbier-has-extensive-brain-damage-doctors-say-n773036″>Otto Warmbier). Science can also tell us about the relation between specific areas of the brain and mental states. We know, for example, that the area of the brain called the visual cortex is related to seeing. But can science tell us how mental states are related to brain states? Can science explain why the visual cortex, for example, is related to seeing, as opposed to smelling or some other mental state, or no mental state at all?
There is a debate in philosophy of mind about this question. On one side of this debate are philosophers who believe that at present we have no scientific idea of how mental states are related to the physical states of the brain. On the other side of this debate are those philosophers who deny this. In this post, we will examine one of the central issues underlying this debate, namely whether mental states can be described scientifically.
When we scientifically describe the nature of something in the physical world we think about its properties that can be measured, such as its weight, size, shape and motion, and these properties are understood mathematically. When we scientifically describe something in the physical world we do not think of how it appears to us. Consider, for example, how science describes the nature of water. Science says its two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (H2O). Notice that this scientific description does not say how water appears to us – that is, how it tastes or looks or smells or feels or sounds. We could scientifically understand things in the physical world, such as water, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, “even we had none of our present senses, so long as we were rational and could understand [its] mathematical and formal properties.” [The View from Nowhere – pg. 14]