Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

I am curious whether people here believe that our minds and mental experiences, events, etc are physical objects. Alternatively, would you place them in their own separate class of objects - dividing the world into the physical and the mental?

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

hi, i think the best way to get yourself going on this is to take a good look at "believe" and "objects" in your first sentence. this is off the top of the head stuff but maybe think of "argue" or "demonstrate" for the first term and maybe "processes", "events". "materially caused phenomena" for the second. some version of this would tighten up your thinking. and give you some feel for your second sentence/question: there have been more journal articles and books written on this subject just since w w one than one could reasonably read in a lifetime.....................b

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

Minds obviously interact with (are affected by and can affect) the physical world, which makes them physical. (You can tell that your mind is affected by physical things by, for example, drinking alcohol.)

We even know something about which parts of the brain are responsible for different mental functions.

Dualism is stupid.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

"Dualism is stupid"

Is there any reason why that is not equivalent to saying that computers can, at least in principle, be made conscious?

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

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Dualism is stupid.

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We'll all find out when we die. Or else we won't.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

Dualism went out of style a long time ago, but identity theory also lost favor in the late 1960s early 70s. There are a lot of good arguments against mind-brain identity theory, and specifically "type physicalism" and "reductionism", but the two criticisms that absolutely shattered this way of thinking were Hilary Putnam's multiple realization argument and Donald Davidson's anomalous monism argument. The former essentially postulates that any given mental state is "multiply realizable" by a variety of physical/biological structures thereby creating it impossible to identify a mental state with a physical state (think of how many neurological configurations can cause pain, and not just in humans but in other creatures as well). Davidson's argument basically shows that laws cannot connect mental kinds with physical kinds which is thought to entail the irreducibility of mental kinds to physical kinds. This all gave way to a functionalist perspective on the mind-body problem which is still circulating in various forms today. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functio...phy_of_mind%29 for a good summary of functionalism. If you're interested in learning more about this subject, check out Jaegwon Kim who is considered one of the forefront thinkers in this area. Some of his books such as Supervenience and Mind and even Mind in a Physical World, though great contributions to the Philosophy of Mind, are highly technical. "Philosophy of Mind," also by Jaegwon Kim, is much more digestable. Lastly, it seems the debate on the mind-body problem nowadays focuses almost entirely on mental and physical properties as opposed to mental and physical events. Acknowledging that a mental event can have both mental and physical properties, such as my desire to respond to this post has both the property of being a desire as well as the physical property of being a certain neural configuration in my brain, I tend to side with Jackson and Pettit who argue that there is room for the mental in physical world if the instantiation of a mental property PROGRAMS for the instatiation of a physical property (which can be any number of physical property instantiations, hence the theory is nonreductive) which then kicks off the causal chain of me clicking reply and writing this post.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

It's all about the neurons... it's all just electrons.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

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It's all about the neurons... it's all just electrons.

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Do we live in a deterministic world then? If it's all just electrons, do we lose free will?

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

I want to criticize the "materialists" on this one, because I think the fact that I have thoughts and pictures that float around and I have absolutely no idea WHERE these things are being seen or WHO is seeing them simply defies easy explanation. Our heads are solid with a big mass of junk inside. Its not a big viewing room in there. WHERE exactly are these thoughts taking place and being seen?

I think it throws a crimp in the materialist dogma. Not to mention, ANYONE who can go a day without realizing how odd it is not to know these answers is clinicaly insane in my book.

g

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

[ QUOTE ]
"Dualism is stupid"

Is there any reason why that is not equivalent to saying that computers can, at least in principle, be made conscious?

[/ QUOTE ]

David, the first problem is that you are using computers as an analogy for brains here. All analogies break down at some point and computers break down terribly as a model for brains. There are a number of aspects of brain functioning that do not successfully model on digital computers. Among these are:

The extensive interconnections between some 100 billion or so neurons in the brain alone. Thousands of inputs and outputs per cell is the norm.
Analogue aspects to brain functioning such as electrical activity on post synaptic cells, presynaptic inhibition by nitric oxide, and reflexive molecular mechanisms in feedback processes to list a few.
Parrellel processing on such a massive scale and the selective attention to stimuli through thalamic gating.
Despite a large body of knowledge related to functioning in the mammallian nervous system at many levels of organization, much about functioning is unknown making modeling not possible.

Not all of these are impossible with modern computers, but all of these issues pose significant challenges to modeling. We still are clueless how consciousness arises from the functioning of the brain.

That said, there's no reason to believe that artificial consciousness is not realizable. But, it might require components not currently present in computers including biological molecules like enzymes and even whole cells in colonies.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

If neither dualism nor identity are considered correct I don't understand what the alternative theory can be. Can you explain further? I'm not interested enough to read highly technical books or links on the subject but would like to know if you can reduce it to layman's terms.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It's all about the neurons... it's all just electrons.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do we live in a deterministic world then? If it's all just electrons, do we lose free will?

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Yes. Freewill is an illusion.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It's all about the neurons... it's all just electrons.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do we live in a deterministic world then? If it's all just electrons, do we lose free will?

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Non-deterministic world (quantum theory and all that).

No free will (i don't see there is a connection to determinism)

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

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If neither dualism nor identity are considered correct I don't understand what the alternative theory can be. Can you explain further? I'm not interested enough to read highly technical books or links on the subject but would like to know if you can reduce it to layman's terms.

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Look up Searle's biological naturalism.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

[ QUOTE ]
"Dualism is stupid"

Is there any reason why that is not equivalent to saying that computers can, at least in principle, be made conscious?

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Computers, at least in principle, can be made conscious. The human brain is a computer.

If you mean a silicon-based computer that just does data-storage and information-processing, I don't know. There may be more to consciousness than that. There seems to be more to a human brain than that, anyway. Brains don't just process information with logic circuits. They have neurotransmitters and hormones and stuff, and these seem to play a big role in affecting the experience of consciousness. So maybe an "artificial" computer would need similar stuff, not just computational information-processing.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

I agree with Benkahuna.
Also, he mentioned differences in way brains process information. This should not be overlooked. Brains have wildly different ways of integrating information at every level, even down to parts of the synapse, when compared to computers, which expand the capability (for want of a better word) of brains way beyond just the sheer number of connections (which, even in an insect, dwarf the best computer out there).
While computers may be a useful model for understanding some aspects of brain function you must realize that's all it is - a model that superficially resembles and predicts some aspects of the brain. In this way the computer model of the brain is not that different form the telephone-switchboard idea of brain function that was popular decades ago.

Re: Dualism/Materialism - does mind = brain?
 

[ QUOTE ]
"Dualism is stupid"

Is there any reason why that is not equivalent to saying that computers can, at least in principle, be made conscious?

[/ QUOTE ]

Can we 'create' something that's conscious? In principle, yes; the fact that there exist things like us that are conscious shows this to be possible I take it. Can computers be conscious? My own view is one of skepticism here--I don't think a Turing test is a good test for whether or not a computer is conscious, and I think a computer is by its nature a non-sentient thing--it is a machine that carries out the formal manipulation of symbols. I think it is at least partly metaphorical to refer to our own cognitive abilities as just symbol manipulation, and I tend to agree with those who see consciousness as a fundamentally qualitatively different phenomenon than formal symbol manipulation.