Mental States

  • to Philosophy of Mind"> An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind

    adminAnimals, Computers, Dualism, Free Choice, Knowledge, Mental States, Pain, Pleasure, Science

    When you think about the mind you can easily find yourself feeling confused. You might start asking questions like these: What is a mind? How does it relate to the body, something that is physical? Is it something we have control over? How does one know that other people have minds? Could computers have minds? Do animals have minds? These are the sorts of questions that philosophers of mind wonder about and have also given answers to. Though there is no consensus to these answers. In the lectures to come, you will get to think about these questions and other related questions. You will see how philosophers think about them too. As you ponder the questions try to think slowly about them. I once read that to do philosophy is to think in slow motion. You may react initially emotionally to a question, but try to fight this reaction. Think about your reasons for your beliefs and think about why someone might disagree with you. You strengthen your views when you can give reasonable responses to objections to them. The questions that philosophers ask about the mind are difficult to answer. This is why philosophers are still trying to answer them for so many centuries.  Part of the reason philosophy is enjoyed is that it can be therapeutic. Even if you can’t be sure of the answers to the questions, the act of thinking about them in a slow, reasoned way can sometimes help remove some of the confusion.

    In the paragraph above I used the term ‘mind’. However, in the lectures I will rarely, if ever, use this term. Instead, I will use the term ‘mental state’ for two reasons. One reason I do this is that the term ‘mind’ may suggest that it is a kind of thing, and this view is controversial. Some philosophers do think of the mind as a kind of thing that has or supports mental states, such as thoughts and feelings. But there are other philosophers who think of the mind, not as a thing, but rather as collection of mental states, that belong to a brain. Although philosophers disagree about whether a mind is a thing, almost all agree that there are mental states. Another reason I have chosen to use the term ‘mental state’ instead of ‘mind’ in the lectures is that the term ‘mind’ may cause you to think that we’re just talking about human minds. We must, however, think more generally when thinking about the mind, for there may be other things besides humans that may have minds. Most of us believe that animals have minds. Some philosophers believe that computers could have minds. If there are extra-terrestrial beings or if God exists, we may wonder about their minds. So for the sake of generality, the questions that we will explore will focus on mental states, not minds. Let me say a little more about these questions. (more…)

  • Do Mental States Exist?

    adminMental States

    There are some, not many, philosophers who argue that there are no mental states – i.e. no thoughts, feelings, dreams, emotions, perceptions, intentions, etc. These philosophers are called eliminativists and their view is called eliminativism. To put it mildly, eliminativism is not a common-sense view. In fact, some have called it a crazy view. It’s clearly a radical view as it challenges a fundamental way we think of ourselves. The following views about mental states, which are taken for granted by most people, would all be false if eliminativism is true:

    • Mental states play a causal role in behavior.
    • Animals have mental states.
    • You can only experience your own mental states.
    • You can know about the contents of your own mental states
    • There are similarities and differences between people’s mental states.
    • Mental states are related to what’s going on in the brain.
    • The quality of an individual’s life depends on his or her mental states.
    • The morality of actions depend on mental states.

    Another implication of eliminativism, albeit not necessarily a negative one, is that many philosophical problems in philosophy of mind would be rendered moot. If there are no mental states, then there wouldn’t be any question about…

    • what the objects of mental states are – whether they are sense-data or objects in the world.
    • whether mental states belong to a non-physical substance.
    • how mental states are related to what’s going on in the brain.
    • how could we know about the mental states of others.
    • whether we have any mental states, such as higher-order mental states, that animals do not have.
    • whether computers could have mental states.
    • whether a person’s actions are free if they are caused by mental states.

    Eliminativists belong to a long tradition of philosophers who have denied the existence of one thing or another that many people have taken for granted. In previous lectures, we’ve discussed some of these philosophers, such as those who have denied non-physical substances and those who have denied the existence of free will. Some of you may belong to this tradition if you deny the existence of God. But even if you believe in the existence of non-physical substances or free will or God, you probably aren’t as confident about whether these things exist as you are about whether your mental states exist. You may even be like some philosophers who are more confident that your mental states exist than anything else in the universe exists. The 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes, the philosopher who believed that mental states are states of a non-physical substance, was one such philosopher. He argued that the existence of everything in the physical world, such as tables and trees and planets and brains, could be doubted because he thought he could be dreaming these things or an all-powerful evil Demon could be deceiving him into thinking that they were existing. But he didn’t think he could doubt the contents of his own mind. He was certain of what he was thinking and perceiving and feeling. If eliminativism is true, then Descartes’ view is false; if there are no mental states, then one cannot have any doubts and there would be no contents of mental states to doubt.

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  • The Mental States of Pleasure and Pain

    adminMental States, Pain, Pleasure

    In life we experience pleasant sensations (what I will refer to as pleasure) and painful sensations (what I will refer to as pain). These mental states play a central role in our lives. We are motivated by them. For example, people go on vacations and take drugs to acquire pleasure or avoid pain. We appeal to them in our judgments of the quality of people’s lives. We generally think it benefits an individual to experience pleasure and a disadvantage for an individual to experience pain. Some people say things like, “Your life is not worth living when you’re suffering too much pain”. We think they matter when we consider the morality of people’s intentions and actions.  People say things like he’s a morally good person because he is always trying to give others pleasure or he is trying to ameliorate their pain or his action is morally wrong because it has caused unnecessary pain. Many even think that animals deserve moral consideration because they have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. In this lecture, we will consider several central questions that philosophers have explored concerning pain and pleasure.  These questions issues include,

    • Are some pleasures/pains qualitatively better/worse than others?
    • Can death be good or bad for a person if she cannot experience any pleasure or pain from it?
    • Does the fact that an animal can experience pleasure and pain make it worthy of moral consideration?
    • Are pleasure and pain the only intrinsically good and bad things?

    Before I begin to discuss these questions, I want to explain why I say that pain is a mental state and what it means to say that pleasure has intrinsic value and pain has intrinsic disvalue.

    I use the term ‘pain’ to refer to both emotional pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you think about something that distresses you, such as the loss of a loved one) and physical pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you injure your body, such as stubbing your toe). What both of these types of pain have in common – why they are both called pain – is that they feel a certain unpleasant way to the individual who has them. Any state that feels a certain way to an individual is a mental state because to feel something is to be conscious of something, and consciousness is an essential mental feature. This is why I say that both emotional pains and physical pains are mental states.

    Why do we appeal to pain and pleasure when we assess the quality of people’s lives as well as the morality of their intentions and actions? It’s because these mental states have intrinsic value. Let me explain what ‘intrinsic value’ means.

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  • The Problem of Knowing Others’ Mental States

    adminKnowledge, Mental States

    I think that others, including both humans and non-human animals, have mental states. I think certain things about their mental states, for example, that some, but not all, people perceive colors. But do I have any reason to believe any of this? My knowledge of others’ mental states seem to be private. That is, I cannot have any direct access to others’ mental states. I can only have direct access to my own mental states. So how can I justify my beliefs about others’ mental states, including my belief that others have mental states? If I cannot justify my beliefs about others’ mental states, then it’s not clear how I can know anything about others’ mental states. This is a problem, what I refer to as the problem of knowing other’s mental states.

    If I cannot know anything about others’ mental states, then I cannot know if I’m giving pleasure or causing pain to others. If that’s the case, it’s not clear that I would be doing something immoral if I treat you like an object, something I can manipulate for my own pleasure. It’s not clear why I should spend any time worrying about the mental well-being of others, since I cannot know if anyone else suffers. In a later post, we will examine more closely the relationship between mental states and value.

    Underlying this problem of knowing about other’s mental states is the idea that I can conceive of others behaving as I do in similar situations but these same others having different mental states than I have or no mental states at all.  Consider the following case. I am outside in a park with my friend and we are both looking at some patch of grass. My friend and I, who both use color terms the same way, agree that the grass is green. Isn’t it conceivable that when my friend looks at the grass and says it looks green, the way the color of the grass looks to him is the way red things look to me? Isn’t it conceivable that the color of the grass doesn’t look any way at all to my friend? Couldn’t he be like a machine that can identify colors, but doesn’t have any conscious perception of them? As you think about these questions (assuming you can think), keep in mind that the scenario asserts that my behavior and my friend’s behavior are the same. So it’s not that my friend is colorblind and says that he is seeing no colors or a different color. Rather, he claims to be perceiving the colors the same way that I’m perceiving them. Since I seem to be able to conceive of these things, the skeptic argues I need to be able to show that they are not actually the case in order to know anything about the perception of my friend. But how can I show this, given that I cannot directly access his mental states?

    According to the skeptic, it’s not only the perception of colors in others that I cannot know anything about. The skeptic argues that I can’t know anything about the mental states of others. Here is how the skeptic argues for this radical claim:

    1. It’s conceivable that others behave as I do in similar circumstances but have different kinds of mental states or have no mental states at all.
    2. The only way I can know anything about the mental states of others is by making an inference – i.e. drawing a conclusion – based on how others look – their physical makeup – and how they behave in certain circumstances.
    3. But there is no way for me to know whether such an inference is any good.
    4. Therefore I cannot know anything about the mental states of others, even if they have any.

    Before we examine some responses to this skeptical argument, I want to emphasize that the skeptic is not claiming that others do not have mental states. Nor is the skeptic claiming that others mental states are in no way to similar to or different from my mental states. What the skeptic is claiming is that I cannot know anything about the mental states of others. So if others do have mental states or their mental states are similar to or different from mine, then, according to the skeptic, I cannot know this. Since I think the skeptic is mistaken, I need to respond to his argument.

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  • Mental States and Animals

    adminAnimals, Mental States

    In the last post, we discussed whether computers could have mental states. This is a highly controversial issue, especially among philosophers. What’s relatively not controversial, even among philosophers, is whether animals have mental states. By “animals” I mean non-human animals. Anyone who has had a cat or a dog as a pet takes it for granted that animals have mental states. Many pet owners describe their pets as being highly intelligent. [Watch this video and you will see some amazing intelligent crow behavior.] Besides intelligence, many pet owners say that their animals have the following mental states: sensations (e.g. they are in pain), perceptions (e.g. they can see and smell and hear and taste), emotions (e.g. they are scared or excited or happy), desires (e.g. they are hungry or tired) and memories (e.g. they remember where who you are or where a bone is buried – check out this video). Some pet owners even insist that their dogs dream. If these pet owners are correct, then animals, at least some of them, such as dogs, maybe even cats, have many of the types of mental states that humans have.

    But how similar are the mental states of non-human animals to the mental states of humans? Humans have thoughts about things. But can dogs or cats have thoughts about things? When you have a thought about something you think about it in a certain way, from a certain ‘conceptual point of view’. For instance, I think that there are electric cars in the United States, my thought is directed at something (cars) under a certain description (as being electric and existing in the United States). If we say that an animal has a thought, do we know what the thought is about. For instance, if you tell a dog to jump in the car, and the dog does it, do we know what the dog is thinking about? Is it thinking anything about the car? Does it think of it as something that has wheels or an engine? Probably not. If it is thinking of it as a car, how does it conceive of a car? If we cannot answer this, can we say that it has an thought about the car, or more generally, any thoughts at all?

    Even if we can know that animals have thoughts and what their thoughts are about, there isn’t much evidence that most animals have higher-order thoughts. A higher-order thought is a thought that is directed at another mental state, such as being in pain. We have thoughts about things in the world, e.g. cars and trees. But we also can think about our thoughts about these things. We can also think about the thoughts of others. Thus, we have higher-order thoughts.

    According to some philosophers, the fact that we have higher-order thoughts explains why our actions can be morally evaluated. When we do something for a reason, we can think think about the reason and evaluate whether it’s a moral reason. Did she kill her husband because she thought she was threatened? If her reason for acting was that she felt threatened, then we may decide that her act of killing is not wrong. Animals seem to act for reasons. The cat bit my foot because he was hungry. But is there any evidence that an animal can think about its reasons for acting. Can the cat think about its hunger. There is little to no evidence that a dog or a cat can think about its own thoughts or the thoughts of others. Furthermore, if an animal cannot think about its own thoughts, then, according to some philosophers, this means that the animal cannot have conscious mental states.

    Before we discuss these challenges to animal mental states, I want to explain why most philosophers agree with pet owners that animals have at least some mental states, even though we cannot experience or directly observe them.

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  • Mental States and Computers

    adminComputers, Mental States

    Could computers, which can be completely described scientifically, have mental states? Clearly they act as if they are intelligent. They seem to understand you when you communicate with them. The can answer questions. They seem to remember things. But maybe they don’t have real intelligence. Maybe their intelligence is merely simulated. How can we ever know which is it, real intelligence or merely simulated intelligence?

    Alan Turing, English philosopher, mathematician and the person credited for creating modern computing, believed that if a computer could ever fool people into thinking it was a person this would be reason to believe that it has mental states. But how could a computer ever fool anyone? You can tell by looking at a computer that it’s not a person. Turing proposed a test, which is now referred to as the Turing Test, where a person (an interrogator) can’t see who he or she is communicating with; it’s either another person or a computer. This interrogator-person would only be getting answers to his or her questions through a computer monitor. If the interrogator-person was communicating with a computer but couldn’t tell whether he or she was communicating with a computer, then Turing believed that the computer passed the test and possessed the mental state of understanding.

    Some philosophers believe that not only computers could have mental states, but that some computers already do have mental states. The philosopher Shelly Kagan uses an example of a chess-playing computer to illustrate such a view  [watch this video at minute 35:07]. He says that when we play a chess-playing computer we explain what it’s doing by ascribing mental states to it. We say things like it believes that we’re going to move our queen or it wants to win the game. We ascribe to it the ability to form goals and to reason about what to do. Why did the computer move it’s bishop? We might say it intends to put us in check or it believes that we’re going to pin it. Beliefs, desires, intentions, reasoning, planning – are examples of mental states.

    The fact that we ascribe mental states to something to explain its behavior does not necessarily mean that it really does have mental states. It might be the case that we are merely personifying it – that is, treating this something as if it’s a person without believing that it has mental states. For example, when we say the grass is thirsty we are obviously personifying it. We don’t believe the grass has mental states. But grass does need water to survive and in this sense is similar to a person; so we speak about it metaphorically, as if it were thirsty. Perhaps then we’re speaking metaphorically when we say a computer is intelligent or has such-and-such belief or desire.

    It’s true that we also treat other things, like grass, as if it they have mental states, when we know that they don’t have them. But there seems to be an important difference between these other things and computers. Computers seem to behave much more like people than grass does. Perhaps this is why Turing believed that if computers could fool people into thinking they were people, then this would indicate they had mental states. Grass isn’t going to fool anyone.

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  • Mental States and Science

    adminMental States, 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]

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  • Mental States and Free Action

    adminFree Choice, Mental States

    Sometimes we do things accidentally. For example, sometimes people crash their cars by accident, for instance, when the roads are icy. But most of the time we do things intentionally, that is, with a purpose. When we intentionally do some action it seems that it has to do with our mental states. For example, my intentionally going to the grocery store yesterday had to do with two of my mental states, a desire and a belief. My desire was to get something for dinner and my belief was that the grocery store had what I wanted for dinner. So there seems to be a relationship between a person’s mental states, such as beliefs and desires, and his or her intentional actions. What sort of relationship is this? Some philosophers believe that when we act intentionally our mental states cause our actions. If this is correct, then my desire for food and my belief that there was food in the grocery store caused me to go to the grocery store.

    If mental states cause our actions, then does one have any control of one’s mental states? When I think about many of my beliefs it doesn’t seem that I can control them. I can’t just get myself to believe that there is no food in the grocery store. I would need some evidence that there is no food in the grocery store to change my belief.  Perhaps, as some philosophers maintain, some beliefs are in a person’s control, such as a belief about God’s existence. Whether or not this is true, it doesn’t seem that I have control over beliefs that I’ve formed on the basis of empirical evidence. If you’re not convinced, consider your belief that you have right now that you’re on Earth and not on the moon. You can imagine yourself being on the moon. You might even try to believe that you’re on the moon. But you can’t just get yourself to believe that you are on the moon. What about desires? Does a person have the ability to control his or her desires? Think about your sexual desires. Can you just decide to have different sexual preferences?  Perhaps one can have some control over some of one’s desires. When I have a desire for food, I might be able to focus my attention on something else (e.g. my desire to lose weight) and this might diminish my desire for food. But the longer I go without food, the stronger my desire for it becomes, and this causes my ability to control my desire for food to become weaker.

    The question of whether a person can control his or her beliefs and desires is important. If a person doesn’t have any control of his or her beliefs and desires, but they cause his or her intentional actions, then it’s not clear whether a person’s intentional actions could ever be free. Could you freely do something if you’re being caused to do this something, but you’re not in control of this cause? And if actions cannot ever be free, then the common sense view that people are sometimes morally morally responsible for what they do is simply mistaken. Moral responsibility is the idea that people deserve blame or praise for their actions. You need to perform an action freely in order to be morally responsible for it. For example, if unbeknownst to you, someone puts a sleeping pill in your drink at a bar and you get into your car and drive it into a tree because you’ve passed out at the wheel you’re not to blame for the crash; you didn’t freely crash the car. However, if you get into a car and freely drive it into a tree because you want to get the insurance money for the car, then you are to blame for the crash.

    So if a person doesn’t have any control of his or her beliefs and desires, but they cause his or her intentional actions, could his or her intentional actions ever be free? There are philosophers who believe the answer is yes. I will use the name “compatibilist” to refer to these philosophers because they believe that free action is compatible with having no control of the mental states that cause intentional action. I will use the name “incompatibilist” to refer to philosophers who believe the answer is no. These philosophers believe that having no control of the mental states that cause intentional action is incompatible with free action. [*See below]

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