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?

[bearly]

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

[maurile]

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.

[David Sklansky]

"Dualism is stupid"

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

[IronUnkind]

[ QUOTE ]
Dualism is stupid.

[/ QUOTE ]

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

[SonofJen]

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.

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

[SonofJen]

[ 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?

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

[benkahuna]

[ 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.