Cartesian Dualism, Strawson, Ryle, etc.

Quote from Watson (about the behaviorist)

"'took the brain to be just one inner part among others of equal importance: 'the behaviorist [places] no more emphasis on the brain and the spinal chord than upon the striped muscles of the body, the plaire muscles of the stomach, [and] the glands' (1930, p.49)"

Philosophical behaviorism quote from Churchland ch. 3

"According to behaviorists the meaning of any mental term is fixed by the many relations it bears to certain to other terms: terms for publicly observable circumstances and behaviors."

What is inner ostension?

"That is a horse," and "This is a fire engine." One expects the hearer to notice the relevant feature in the situation presented, and to be able to reapply the term correctly when a new situation displays the same features. -[Direct Ostension] explicit and complete: "An isoceles triangle is a 3-sided closed plane figure..." -partial and incomplete: "Energy is what makes our cars run and keeps our lights burning."

Alex Byrne about the behaviorist

"The behaviorist takes minds not to be inner psychic mechanisms merely contingently connected with their outer behavioral effects, but to be constituded by those outer effects. The behaviorist's motivation is often epistemological: on the picture of the mind as essentially inner, how can its outer effects provide us with the wide ranging knowledge of others' minds we confidently take ourselves to possess?"

Behaviorism

"The behaviorist takes minds not to be inner psychic mechanisms merely contingently connected with their outer behavioral effects, but to be constituted by those outer effects. The behaviorists motivation is often epistemological: on the picture of the mind as essentially inner, how can its outer eects provide us with the wide ranging knowledge of others' minds we confidently take ourselves to possess?" Clock- the inner workings of any clock are entirely irrelevant to its statues as a clock. The two extremes--Descarte emphasizes the inner workings(ghost in a machine); whereas, Ryle and Strawson say a person is not fundamentally this inner thing but is by the behavior and external appearances.

Christof Koch "What Is Consciousness?"

"The brain as a whole can be considered an NCC(Neuronal correlates of consciousness) but the seat of consciousness can be further ring-fenced." ex) binocular rivalry "So it appears that the sights, sounds and other sensations of life as we experience it are generated by regions within the posterior cortex." Koch defines consciousness as the "intrinsic causal power associated with complex mechanisms such as the human brain." and "consciousness cannot be computed [programmed]: it must be built into the structure of the system.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Language Argument (he had a further argument against the standard view) as in Churchland's ch. 3 on the Semantic problem

--say you give meaning to a term "w" by associating it with a certain sensation, at a later time you experience another "w"--but how do you know you've used the term correctly? --If the term "w" enjoys no meaning connections whatsoever with other phenomena, such as standard causes and effects of the kind of sensation at issue, thn there will be absolutely no way to distinguish between a correct use of "w" and an incorrect use of "w"

Meditation 1

-cannot doubt existence because dream is mad of true memories/hands, feet, nose--real objects, also in order to doubt or to think there must be someone doing the doubting and thinking(you are aware of your thoughts so you are aware of another part of you/if it was just one thing you couldn't be knowing of your own thoughts). -The human mind is a thing that thinks -the idea of God cannot be created by man because its idea is more perfect than him.

What are the five claims of classical dualism?

1)There is a mental realm(mental items exist e.g. thoughts, beliefs, sensations and there are things that believe and feel the sensations) 2)The mental realm is fundamental(Fundamental:mental items are ontologically basic, fully independently real) 3)There is a material realm(There are material properties and subjects) 4)The material/physical realm is fundamental(material items are ontologically basic) 5)The two realms are ontollogically independent(the existence of the items does not depend upon the existence of the items of the other realm

What is the semantical problem? according to Paul M. Churchland in chapter three of his novel titled "Matter and Consciousness"

1)the meaning of any common-sense psychological term derives from an inner ostension 2) their meaning derives from operational definitions 3)the meaning of nay such term derives from its unique place in a network of laws that collectively constitute our 'folk' psychology

Explain a philosophical zombie and the ideas it holds

A philosophical zombie is just stimuli producing reactions, no 1st person experience. You can't ask then, "What is it like to be a robot?"

Churchlin's view

Churchlin's view is materialism/identity theory (the qualitative experience is identical to the brain happenings, pg. 228-229) Identity theory: sensations in 1st person experiences are just identical to the neural phenomena and the stimulation of these sensory pathways.

The Cogito Argument(found in meditation 2 of Cartesian Dualism)

DesCarte thinks this is "demon(the omnipotent deciever) proof" or undoubtable. 1)Where there is deception there must be a belief, "b". 2)There is deception(evil demon) 3)A belief, b, exists. 4)I am; I exist.(I don't need a body to exist) The Cogito presents a picture of the world and of knowledge in which the mind is something that can know itself better than it can know anything else. The idea that we know our mind first and how the mind cannot connect with reality. The mind ceases to be something that helps us know about the world and becomes something inside which we are locked. So, whatever thinks exists. I am; I exist.

Materialist Monism/Materialism/Physicalism

Everything is material in nature/They dont reject the mental realm/ They claim that while everything that exists is entirely material in nature, there still are such things as thoughts, beliefs, pains, selves, etc.

zap-zip test

In the early 2000s Giulio Tononi pioneered this technique, called zap and zip, to probe whether someone is conscious or not. "The scientists held a sheathed coil of wire against the scalp and "zapped' it--sent an intense pulse of magnetic energy into the skull--inducing a brief electric current in the neurons underneath. The perturbation, in turn, excited and inhibited the neurons' partner cells in connected regions, in a chain reverberating across the cortex, until the activity died out."

Explain washing Machine analogy(Churchlin)

Necessary vs sufficient conditions: If there is a part of the machine that's broken (a sensor) and that effects the ability to wash clothes--that doesn't mean the sensor is responsible for washing clothes just that the sensor is necessary to wash clothes. --same for the brain. This part of the brain is necessary for this function but not sufficient. It is necessary to be warm blooded to mammals, but it is sufficient to be human and a mammal.

Explain what physical and agential behavior is.

Physical behavior is a physical change to an agent's body(perhaps in relation to his environment) such as the rising of the agent's arm or the eye blinked/imitation of blinking/sporadic eye twitch(all are same physically and indistinguishable on different levels) Agential behavior is something an agent does, such as raising his arm (occurs on things that think, have intentions)

Give 1st person experience example as Koch "What Is Consciousness?" describes with the color red...

Picture the color red. You can't capture that image from your mind and show it to a blind person. So does a blind person know what red is from a detailed description? Redness is qualitatively different from its explanation. (And you can program the color red into robots but that's the programmer's perception of red not the robots.)

What is the Official Doctrine(Cartesian Dualism) and how does DesCarte describe it?

Premises: Every human has both body and mind, ordinarily, harnessed together--after death his mind may continue to exist and function. Human bodies are in space(subject to mechanical laws), and minds are not in space. Consciousness is not spatial. 1)Descarte introduces methodology of skepticism/methodological doubt saying "it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive." Our vision is not always correct...senses are unreliable bc they are so prone to mistakes. He implores the possibility of dreaming and our inability to distinguish dream from reality. He says i think; therefore, i am. I am a thinking thing so I must exist.

What role does qualia play in determining the meanings of our psychological terms? And what does Churchlin think ab qualia?

Qualia plays some role with some terms...since the qualia of your sensations are apparent only to you, and mine only to me, then a part of the meaning of our sensation-terms will remain private will remain private. Qualia can be conceded an epistemological significance for terms in an intersubjective language. As with theoretical terms generally, one comes to understand them only as one learns to use the predictive and explanatory generalizations in which they figure. Qualia(Qualitative experiences) has much more material than we think it. Problem of qualia-1st person perspective Churchlin doesn't think qualia is nonreducible/mysterious; he thinks eventually we'll be able to map out and construct all these qualitative experiences.

Quasi-behaviorism

Ryle was chiefly concerned to deflate the idea that there must be complex inner mental processes behind a person's public actions and to show how this dissolved the problem of other minds.

Ryle's refutation of The Official Doctrine

Ryle's project consists in a sustained and punishing bombardment of the cartesian conception of man, characteristically labelled "the dogma of the ghost in the machine". The dogma/the philosopher's myth belongs to a category mistake. He uses example of university(The university is just the way in which all that he was already seen is oranized, rather than another separate counter part ) and the example of team spirit(Team spirit is not another function to the team, but a result of performing those team tasks). Ryle disproves the official doctrine by showing that "a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory."--thus the representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument. A dualist believes the mental is in a category of its own and should be treated differently--its not that simple--a person's thinking, feeling, and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry, and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organized unit, so the human mind must be another complex organized unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure. Human body: field of causes and effects Mind: another field, though not mechanical causes and effects Paramechanical Hypothesis: -Minds are things but different sorts of things, a diff cause and effect -Nothing is known of how the mind governs the bodily engine -Minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves spectral machines. You can have distinct processes in both mental and physical but never just one side. You can't have a purely mental activity. Can't have the mind without the body.

Strawson

Strawson refutes DesCarte's belief that we can exist without a body; the mind and body can be separate. -We don't refer to the body as separate, thus the body and mind shouldn't be separate. Predicate Objection: We should be able to sort out mental predicate and body predicate--and Strawson thinks we can't and, thus, there is a massive prob with Dualism. ex) John is writing a letter there. The predicate being "writing a letter". The person(John) is a union of the mental and physical substance able. You can't write without the body. Its not possible to think of mental doing on its own without the person/the body. When we predicate we are predicating it to the person. You can't separate the perceptions(senses) into distinctly mental and distinctly physical. Individuation Objection (individuating people): There is a problem individuating/counting out material and immaterial substance. How do we know if there aren't many immaterial substances/many souls? Why should we limit the immaterial substance at one with the body? How do you individuate a soul? You can't differentiate the souls on dualism. Third Objection: You can't jump from "I have thoughts" to I am one thing. You can't determine you are the same person from every instance of thought. A thought now and a thought 10 seconds from now doesn't mean I am the same entity having all these thoughts or just a million entities having thoughts at different times. There are problems with personal identity. What makes you the same person 20 years from now? Just having the thought "I exist" at two different points of time doesn't mean you are the same.

MEDITATION 2:

The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body. I am, I exist is a certain truth, though unsure of what I am. Uses wax melting example: Our knowledge that the solid piece of wax and the melted piece of wax are the same cannot come through the senses since all of its sensible properties have changed. Judging the wax exists proves that I exist as well bc it proves I see the wax. I imagine the wax, I touch it, so i am. The mind is far better knowing than the body(the senses). Cogito ergo sum: I think; therefore, I am "I cannot know without certainty that what 'I' perceive is real, but that sensory perception, as a form of thought, confirms that 'I' exist('I' being the mind). Everytime 'I' perceive 'I' am thinking, and in thinking 'I' am enacting the cogito. Every perception confirms the existence of 'my' mind and only gives dubitable evidence for the existence of the world. Thus, the mind is better known than the body."

Putnam's cluster concept on behaviorism

There are multiple responses to pain/ deal with internally/ not something we recognize just based off of people's responses/ pain is not the response ex) pink elephant hallucination "pains are not clusters of responses, but that they are (normally, in our experience to date) the causes of certain clusters of responses" Why should we think pain is not a cluster of responses? It is a mental state that cannot be reduced to behavior. ex) spartan--training entire life to ignore pain without behavior associated (so logical behaviorism is bad). Putnam thinks pain is the way to disprove logical behaviorism (mental states have to translate into physical states).

The impossibility of a private language(Byrne)

To object Descartes(talking of the mental in only mental terms)--You can't have coherent language for sensations unless you look into a community. You need community input to develop language. Otherwise, in active situations there would be nothing to tie the system of rules and symbols to. For a language to come into existence you need to communicate with at least one responsive other. Therefore, it'd be impossible for you to label your own sensation.

Can A.I. have qualia? Churchlin's view.

We aren't scientifically there yet. If qualia is identical to the brainstate(neural phenomena)--not just immaterial--that means we can replicate that elsewhere.

(Churchlin) Fallacy

When this part of the brain is damaged people can't execute language or short term memory... The assumption that if this part of the brain is damaged and it results in this loss of function and this part of the brain is responsible-- that doesn't follow.

Does Christof Koch think robots can develop the 1st person perspective?

Yes, he thinks we can create the 1st person perspective in a robot given the right technology. This assumes that consciousness is apart of the brain. Something can manifest and exhibit just like an angry person but are they aware? No/not experiencing anger. You can program a robot to respond to certain stimuli--like a water bottle being thrown at it, but that is just a function not qualia or experience.

Psychological behaviorism

a claim about the correct methodology of a scientific psychology that generally human behaviors are learned and that a person's psychology can be explained through observable behavior. This major theory arose in the early part of the twentieth century as a reaction to 'introspective' psychology (the subject matter of psychology is consciousness and the proper methodology for its study is introspection). Against this, Watson argued that a scientific psychology should just concern itself, with what is 'objective,' and 'observable,' namely, according to him, behavior.

What is a meaningless term?

a term whose proper application is forever and always beyond determination. No term can be meaningful in the absence of systematic connections with other terms. Meaning is something a term can enjoy only in the context of other terms, terms connected to one another by means of general statements that contain them

Behavior-as-sufficient

anything that has physical behavioral dispositions of a certain kind and complexity has a mental life. (functionalism is inconsistent with this) "to refute the view that a certain level of behavioral dispositions is sufficient for a mental life, we need convincing cases of rich behavior with no accompanying mental states." (or if found mental being with no behavior would refute behaviorism.)

eliminative behaviorism/ eliminativism

is a forerunner of the contemporary doctrine of eliminative materialism. Eliminativists about the mental repudiate all or most of our commensense psychological ontology: beliefs, conscious states, sensations, and so on. We can know everything we need to know about someone by reading their behaviors. Our common definition of the mind is false--we all exist just on a physical level. This eliminates inner talk(no such thing) and no first person perspective. How do we best figure out what people think? look at behavior. Watson and Skinner are eliminative behaviorists.

Logical behaviorism

mental events are logical constructions out of actual and possible behavior events and all talk about 'mental events' is translatable into talk about overt behavior Putnam's example: Pain has no indicator. We don't do the exact same thing to feel pain, and there are different levels of pain "both the dualist and the materialist would want to argue that, although the meaning of 'pain' may be explained by reference to overt behavior, what we mean by 'pain' is not the presence of an event or condition that normally causes those responses."

Brain Lesion

naturally or experimentally caused destruction of brain tissue. When the brain is damaged in this area and undermines a function, this is a necessary condition.

Behavior-as-necessary

necessarily, anything that has no physical behavioral dispositions of a certain kind and complexity doesnt have a mental life. Ex) something like a stone couldn't have a mental life, because it is outwardly inert(not because there is nothing sufficiently complicated going on in the stone) "to refute that a certain level of behavioral dispositions is necessary for a mental life, we need convincing cases of thinking stones, or utterly incurable paralytics, or disembodied minds. But these alleged possibilities are to save merely that."

do you think the zip zap test constitutes as a test of consciousness?

no, its just a zap predicting sensations. If a zombie feels the zap it shows consciousness, but we need an indicator/proxy which is a measurable range. How well does this proxy work? I just think this test doesn't cover enough, is too broad...

supervenient behaviorism

psychological facts supervene on physical behavioral dispositions: necessarily, if x and y differ with respect to types of mental states, then they differ with respect to types of behavioral dispositions

What is consciousness?

self awareness, identity, the first person perspective(something no one else can know; you never have direct access to others), what it feels like to be courtney

What is semantic solipsism? (according to Churchland)

solipsism: the thesis that all knowledge is impossible save for knowledge of one's immediate conscious self. semantic solipsism: since each of us can experience only one's own state of consciousness, it would then be impossible for anyone to tell whether or not one's own meaning for "pain" is the same.

Dualism

soul interacts with the body and material interacts with the immaterial. The mind and body are separate entities independent of each other.

Analytic(or logical) behaviorism

statements containing mental vocabulary can be analyzed into statements containing just the vocabulary of physical behavior. (Watson & Skinner)

The Standard View (according to Churchland)

terms like "pain," "itch," and "sensation of red" --many important types of mental states have no qualitative character at all or none relevant to their identity/ their meaning (the belief that P...) must derive from some other source. --Pain could be a headache, a piercing noise, a burn...and all of these qualia are similar in causing a reaction of dislike in the victum, but this is a cuasal/relational property common to all pains, not a shared quale. --another example of shared causal/relationships features: The class of sensations of red is equally delimited by the fact that such sensations typically result from viewing standard examples as lips, strawberries, apples, and fire engines. You can know what pain is without feeling it by learning all of its causal/relationship properties.

Functionalism(Armstrong, Lewis, and others)

the meanings of mental terms are determined by their role in our common sense theory of behavior: folk psychology -linking perceptual input, (physical) behavioral output, and mental states.

hard problem of consciousness

the question of how brain processes result in our personal conscious experience (qualia)/we rely on what someone self reports

The Theoretical Network thesis and Folk pyschology (Churchland)

the view: "Our commen-sense terms for mental states are the theoretical framework (namely, 'folk psychology') embedded in our common-sense understanding, and the meaning of those terms is fixed by the set of laws/principles/generalizations in which they figure.