Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution (not to be confused with dysgenics) is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time. The concept relates to the idea that evolution has a divine purpose (teleology) and is thus progressive (orthogenesis), for example that feet might be better than hooves, or lungs than gills. However, evolutionary biology makes no such assumptions, and natural selection shapes adaptations
with no foreknowledge or foresights of any kind regarding the outcome.
It is possible for small changes (such as in the frequency of a single
gene) to be reversed by chance or selection, but this is no different
from the normal course of evolution and as such de-evolution is not
compatible with a proper understanding of evolution due to natural
selection.
In the 19th century, when belief in orthogenesis was widespread, zoologists such as Ray Lankester and Anton Dohrn and palaeontologists Alpheus Hyatt and Carl H. Eigenmann advocated the idea of devolution. The concept appears in Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel Galápagos, which portrays a society that has evolved backwards to have small brains.
Dollo's law of irreversibility, first stated in 1893 by the palaeontologist Louis Dollo, denies the possibility of devolution. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains Dollo's law as being simply a statement about the improbability of evolution's following precisely the same path twice.
Context
Lamarck's theory of evolution involved a complexifying force that progressively drives animal body plans towards higher levels, creating a ladder of phyla, as well as an adaptive force that causes animals with a given body plan to adapt to circumstances. The idea of progress in such theories permits the opposite idea of decay, seen in devolution.
The idea of devolution is based on the presumption of orthogenesis, the view that evolution has a purposeful direction towards increasing complexity. Modern evolutionary theory, beginning with Darwin at least, poses no such presumption; further, the concept of evolutionary change is independent of either
any increase in complexity of organisms sharing a gene pool, or any
decrease, such as in vestigiality or in loss of genes. Earlier views that species are subject to "cultural decay", "drives to
perfection", or "devolution" are practically meaningless in terms of
current (neo-)Darwinian theory. Early scientific theories of transmutation of species such as Lamarckism
perceived species diversity as a result of a purposeful internal drive
or tendency to form improved adaptations to the environment. In
contrast, Darwinian evolution and its elaboration in the light of
subsequent advances in biological research, have shown that adaptation through natural selection
comes about when particular heritable attributes in a population happen
to give a better chance of successful reproduction in the reigning
environment than rival attributes do. By the same process less
advantageous attributes are less "successful"; they decrease in
frequency or are lost completely. Since Darwin's time it has been shown
how these changes in the frequencies of attributes occur according to
the mechanisms of genetics and the laws of inheritance originally investigated by Gregor Mendel. Combined with Darwin's original insights, genetic advances led to what has variously been called the modern evolutionary synthesis or the neo-Darwinism of the 20th century. In these terms evolutionary
adaptation may occur most obviously through the natural selection of
particular alleles. Such alleles may be long established, or they may be new mutations. Selection also might arise from more complex epigenetic or other chromosomal changes, but the fundamental requirement is that any adaptive effect must be heritable.
The concept of devolution on the other hand, requires that there
be a preferred hierarchy of structure and function, and that evolution
must mean "progress" to "more advanced" organisms. For example, it could
be said that "feet are better than hooves" or "lungs are better than gills",
so their development is "evolutionary" whereas change to an inferior or
"less advanced" structure would be called "devolution". In reality an
evolutionary biologist defines all heritable changes to relative
frequencies of the genes or indeed to epigenetic states in the gene pool as evolution. All gene pool changes that lead to increased fitness in terms of
appropriate aspects of reproduction are seen as (neo-)Darwinian
adaptation because, for the organisms possessing the changed structures,
each is a useful adaptation to their circumstances. For example, hooves
have advantages for running quickly on plains, which benefits horses,
and feet offer advantages in climbing trees, which some ancestors of
humans did.
The concept of devolution as regress from progress relates to the
ancient ideas that either life came into being through special creation
or that humans are the ultimate product or goal of evolution. The
latter belief is related to anthropocentrism,
the idea that human existence is the point of all universal existence.
Such thinking can lead on to the idea that species evolve because they
"need to" in order to adapt to environmental changes. Biologists refer
to this misconception as teleology, the idea of intrinsic finality
that things are "supposed" to be and behave a certain way, and
naturally tend to act that way to pursue their own good. From a
biological viewpoint, in contrast, if species evolve it is not a
reaction to necessity, but rather that the population contains
variations with traits that favour their natural selection.
This view is supported by the fossil record which demonstrates that
roughly ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now
extinct.
People thinking in terms of devolution commonly assume that
progress is shown by increasing complexity, but biologists studying the evolution of complexity
find evidence of many examples of decreasing complexity in the record
of evolution. The lower jaw in fish, reptiles and mammals has seen a
decrease in complexity, if measured by the number of bones. Ancestors of
modern horses had several toes on each foot; modern horses have a
single hooved toe. Modern humans may be evolving towards never having wisdom teeth, and already have lost most of the tail found in many other mammals - not to mention other vestigial structures, such as the vermiform appendix or the nictitating membrane. In some cases, the level of organization of living creatures can also “shift” downwards (e.g., the loss of multicellularity in some groups of protists and fungi).
A more rational version of the concept of devolution, a version
that does not involve concepts of "primitive" or "advanced" organisms,
is based on the observation that if certain genetic changes in a
particular combination (sometimes in a particular sequence as well) are
precisely reversed, one should get precise reversal of the evolutionary
process, yielding an atavism or "throwback", whether more or less complex than the ancestors where the process began. At a trivial level, where just one or a few mutations are involved,
selection pressure in one direction can have one effect, which can be
reversed by new patterns of selection when conditions change. That could
be seen as reversed evolution, though the concept is not of much
interest because it does not differ in any functional or effective way
from any other adaptation to selection pressures.
The concept of degenerative evolution was used by scientists in the 19th century; at this time it was believed by most biologists that evolution had some kind of direction.
In 1857 the physician Bénédict Morel, influenced by Lamarckism, claimed that environmental factors such as taking drugs or alcohol would produce social degeneration in the offspring of those individuals, and would revert those offspring to a primitive state. Morel, a devout Catholic,
had believed that mankind had started in perfection, contrasting modern
humanity to the past. Morel claimed there had been "Morbid deviation
from an original type". His theory of devolution was later advocated by some biologists.
According to Roger Luckhurst:
Darwin soothed readers that evolution was progressive,
and directed towards human perfectibility. The next generation of
biologists were less confident or consoling. Using Darwin's theory, and
many rival biological accounts of development then in circulation,
scientists suspected that it was just as possible to devolve, to slip back down the evolutionary scale to prior states of development.
One of the first biologists to suggest devolution was Ray Lankester, he explored the possibility that evolution by natural selection may in some cases lead to devolution, an example he studied was the regressions in the life cycle of sea squirts. Lankester discussed the idea of devolution in his book Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism
(1880). He was a critic of progressive evolution, pointing out that
higher forms existed in the past which have since degenerated into
simpler forms. Lankester argued that "if it was possible to evolve, it
was also possible to devolve, and that complex organisms could devolve
into simpler forms or animals".
Anton Dohrn also developed a theory of degenerative evolution based on his studies of vertebrates. According to Dohrn many chordates are degenerated because of their environmental conditions. Dohrn claimed cyclostomes such as lampreys
are degenerate fish as there is no evidence their jawless state is an
ancestral feature but is the product of environmental adaptation due to parasitism. According to Dohrn if cyclostomes would devolve further then they would resemble something like an Amphioxus.
The historian of biology Peter J. Bowler has written that devolution was taken seriously by proponents of orthogenesis and others in the late 19th century who at this period of time firmly believed that there was a direction in evolution. Orthogenesis was the belief that evolution travels in internally directed trends and levels. The paleontologistAlpheus Hyatt discussed devolution in his work, using the concept of racial senility as the mechanism of devolution. Bowler defines racial senility as "an evolutionary retreat back to a state resembling that from which it began."
Hyatt who studied the fossils of invertebrates believed that up to a point ammonoids
developed by regular stages up until a specific level but would later
due to unfavourable conditions descend back to a previous level, this
according to Hyatt was a form of lamarckism as the degeneration was a
direct response to external factors. To Hyatt after the level of
degeneration the species would then become extinct, according to Hyatt
there was a "phase of youth, a phase of maturity, a phase of senility or
degeneration foreshadowing the extinction of a type". To Hyatt the devolution was predetermined by internal factors which
organisms can neither control or reverse. This idea of all evolutionary
branches eventually running out of energy and degenerating into extinction was a pessimistic view of evolution and was unpopular amongst many scientists of the time.
Carl H. Eigenmann an ichthyologist wrote Cave vertebrates of America: a study in degenerative evolution (1909) in which he concluded that caveevolution was essentially degenerative. The entomologistWilliam Morton Wheeler and the LamarckianErnest MacBride (1866–1940) also advocated degenerative evolution. According to Macbride invertebrates were actually degenerate vertebrates, his argument was based on the idea that "crawling on the seabed was inherently less stimulating than swimming in open waters."
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and other monogenists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
were believers in the "Degeneration theory" of racial origins. The
theory claims that races can degenerate into "primitive" forms.
Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were white
and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental
factors such as the sun and poor diet. Buffon believed that the
degeneration could be reversed if proper environmental control was taken
and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race.
Blumenbach claimed Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos and the Chinese were fair skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors.
I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian because this stock displays the most beautiful race of men.
According to Blumenbach the other races are supposed to have
degenerated from the Caucasian ideal stock. Blumenbach denied that his
"Degeneration theory" was racist; he also wrote three essays claiming
non-white peoples are capable of excelling in arts and sciences in
reaction against racialists of his time who believed they couldn't.
In literature and popular culture
Cyril M. Kornbluth's 1951 short story "The Marching Morons" is an example of dysgenic pressure
in fiction, describing a man who accidentally ends up in the distant
future and discovers that dysgenics has resulted in mass stupidity.
Similarly, Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy has the same premise, with the main character the subject of a military hibernation
experiment that goes awry, taking him 500 years into the future. While
in "The Marching Morons", civilization is kept afloat by a small group
of dedicated geniuses, in Idiocracy, voluntary childlessness among high-IQ couples leaves only automated systems to fill that role. The 1998 song "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger
finds lighthearted humor in dysgenics with the lines "Been around the
world and found/That only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning
and feeding/And I don't even own a tv". H. G. Wells' 1895 novel, The Time Machine,
describes a future world where humanity has degenerated into two
distinct branches who have their roots in the class distinctions of
Wells' day. Both have sub-human intelligence and other putative dysgenic
traits.
T. J. Bass's novels Half Past Human and The Godwhale describe humanity becoming cooperative and "low-maintenance" to the detriment of all other traits.
The American new wave band Devo
derived both their name and overarching philosophy from the concept of
"de-evolution" and used social satire and humor to espouse the idea that
humanity had actually regressed over time. According to music critic Steve Huey, the band "adapted the theory to
fit their view of American society as a rigid, dichotomized instrument
of repression ensuring that its members behaved like clones, marching
through life with mechanical, assembly-line precision and no tolerance
for ambiguity."
LEGO's 2009 Bionicle
sets include Glatorian and Agori. One of the six tribes includes The
Sand Tribe, which the Glatorian and Agori of that tribe are turned into scorpion-like beasts—the Vorox and the Zesk—by their creators, The Great Beings; whom are also of the same species as Glatorian and Agori.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel Galápagos is set a million years in the future, where humans have "devolved" to have much smaller brains. Robert E. Howard, in The Hyborian Age, an essay on his Conan the Barbarian universe, stated that the Atlanteans devolved into "ape-men", and had once been the Picts (distinct from the actual people; his are closely modeled on AlgonquianNative Americans). Similarly, Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy,
believed, contrary to standard evolutionary theory, that apes had
devolved from humans rather than the opposite, through affected people
"putting themselves on the animal level".
Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels contains a story about Yahoos, a kind of human-like creature turned into a savage, animal-like the state of society in which the Houyhnhnms—descendants of horses—are the dominant species.
The Children and Parents area in the Priory Church of St Mary, Totnes, Devon, UKChairs for children in the Church of Agia Marina in Kissos (Pelion, Greece)
A parochial school (US) or faith school (UK), is a type of school which engages in religious education
in addition to conventional education. Parochial schools may be primary
or secondary and may have state funding but varying amounts of control
by a religious organization. In addition, there are religious schools
which only teach the religion and subsidiary subjects (such as the
language of the holy books), typically run on a part-time basis separate
from normal schooling. Examples are the Christian Sunday schools and the Jewish Hebrew schools. Islamic religious schools are known in English by the Arabic loanwordMadrasah.
Religion may have an influence on what goes on in state schools. For example, in the UK the Education Act 1944
introduced the requirement for daily prayers in all state-funded
schools, but later acts changed this requirement to a daily "collective
act of worship", the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 being the most recent. This also requires such acts of worship to be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". The term "mainly" means that acts related to other faiths can be carried out providing the majority are Christian.
Many legal experts have argued that the government should create laws
in the interests of the welfare of children, irrespective of the
religion of their parents. Nicholas Humphrey
has argued that children "have a human right not to have their minds
crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas," and should have the
ability to question the religious views of their parents.
In "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights", philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of the subject in the 19th century:
"And as the capacity for believing
is strongest in childhood, special care is taken to make sure of this
tender age. This has much more to do with the doctrines of belief taking
root than threats and reports of miracles. If, in early childhood,
certain fundamental views and doctrines are paraded with unusual
solemnity, and an air of the greatest earnestness never before visible
in anything else; if, at the same time, the possibility of a doubt about
them be completely passed over, or touched upon only to indicate that
doubt is the first step to eternal perdition, the resulting impression
will be so deep that, as a rule, that is, in almost every case, doubt
about them will be almost as impossible as doubt about one's own
existence."
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Religion: A Dialogue
Several authors have been critical of religious indoctrination of children, such as Nicholas Humphrey, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins use the term child abuse to describe the harm that some religious upbringings inflict on children. A. C. Grayling
has argued "we are all born atheists... and it takes a certain amount
of work on the part of the adults in our community to persuade
[children] differently."
Dawkins states that he is angered by the labels "Muslim child" or
"Catholic child". He asks how a young child can be considered
intellectually mature enough to have such independent views on the
cosmos and humanity's place within it. By contrast, Dawkins states, no
reasonable person would speak of a "Marxist child" or a "Tory child." He suggests there is little controversy over such labeling because of the "weirdly privileged status of religion". Once, Dawkins stated that sexually abusing a child
is "arguably less" damaging than "the long term psychological damage
inflicted by bringing up a child Catholic in the first place". Dawkins
later wrote that this was an off-the-cuff remark.
Some scholars of Islam have permitted the child marriage
of older men to girls as young as 10 years of age if they have entered
puberty. The Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children
describes cases of a 10-year-old girl being married and raped in Yemen (Nujood Ali), a 13-year-old Yemeni girl dying of internal bleeding three days after marriage, and a 12-year-old girl dying in childbirth after marriage.
Some religions treat illness, both mental and physical, in a manner
that does not heal, and in some cases exacerbates the problem. Specific
examples include faith healing of certain Christian sects, denominations which eschew medical care including vaccinations or blood transfusions, and exorcisms.
Faith based practices for healing purposes have come into direct
conflict with both the medical profession and the law when victims of
these practices are harmed, or in the most extreme cases, killed by
these "cures."A detailed study in 1998 found 140 instances of deaths of children due to religion-based medical neglect. Most of these cases involved religious parents relying on prayer to cure the child's disease, and withholding medical care.
Dawkins proposes that religion is a by-product arising from other features of the human species that are adaptive. One such feature is the tendency of children to "believe, without
question, whatever your grown-ups tell you" (Dawkins, 2006, p. 174).
Psychologist Paul Bloom sees religion as a by-product of children's instinctive tendency toward a dualistic view of the world, and a predisposition towards creationism. Deborah Kelemen has also written that children are naturally teleologists, assigning a purpose to everything they come across.
Many have looked at stage models, like those of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, to explain how children develop ideas about God and religion in general.
Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly.
Dualism finds its entry into Western philosophy thanks to René Descartes in the 17th century. Substance dualists like Descartes argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.
Monism is the position that mind and body are ontologically indiscernible entities, not dependent substances. This view was espoused by the 17th-century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. Physicalists
argue that only entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that
mental processes will eventually be explained in terms of these entities
as physical theory continues to evolve. Physicalists maintain various
positions on the prospects of reducing mental properties to physical properties (many of whom adopt compatible forms of property dualism), and the ontological status of such mental properties remains unclear. Idealists
maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world
is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists such as Ernst Mach and William James
argue that events in the world can be thought of as either mental
(psychological) or physical depending on the network of relationships
into which they enter, and dual-aspect monists such as Spinoza
adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and
that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The
most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been
variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.
Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive physicalist or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science (specifically, artificial intelligence), evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties
will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological
processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the mind is not a separate substance, mental properties supervene
on physical properties, or that the predicates and vocabulary used in
mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be
reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical
science. Continued neuroscientific
progress has helped to clarify some of these issues; however, they are
far from being resolved. Modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how
the subjective qualities and the intentionality of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.
The problems of physicalist theories of the mind have led some
contemporary philosophers to assert that the traditional view of
substance dualism should be defended. From this perspective, this theory
is coherent, and problems such as "the interaction of mind and body"
can be rationally resolved.
Illustration of mind–body dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland, and from there to the immaterial spirit.
The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the
nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds
are affected by and can affect the body.
Perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs
from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental
states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant
or unpleasant. For example, someone's desire for a slice of pizza will
tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner
and direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how
it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of
gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.
A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from the time of René Descartes.
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.
Wrongly conflating purusha ("spirit", or better, pure consciousness) with mind or manas - an evolute of non-conscious prakriti, while correctly distinguishing purusha and prakriti - two eternally-different ontological entities, leads to the erroneous conclusion that Samkhya supports mind-body dualism, specifically substance dualism (see below). It does not. Both mind and body (better Indriya - sensors and effectors) are equally jaDaa (non-conscious) in Samkhya and while they are different evolutes of prakriti, they are both made up of gunas. It is true, however, that mind and sensors-effectors are different functions of prakriti
and so a form of property dualism (also defined below) may be found in
the ancient (ca. 6th c. BCE) Indian philosophical schools of Samkhya and Yoga.
In Western philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who suggested that humans' intelligence (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body. However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans". Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness,
and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of
intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind–body
problem in the form in which it still exists today.
Arguments for dualism
The
most frequently used argument in favor of dualism appeals to the
common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from
inanimate matter. If asked what the mind is, the average person would
usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul,
or another related entity. They would almost certainly deny that the
mind simply is the brain, or vice versa, finding the idea that there is
just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic or unintelligible. Modern philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading, and that critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, should be used to examine these assumptions and determine whether there is any real basis to them.
According to some, the mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do
not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels
like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a
person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in
the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the prefrontal cortex feels like.
Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events "qualia" or "raw feels". There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly
difficult to reduce to anything physical. David Chalmers explains this
argument by stating that we could conceivably know all the objective
information about something, such as the brain states and wavelengths of
light involved with seeing the color red, but still not know something
fundamental about the situation – what it is like to see the color red.
If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical
reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created
concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how
consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that
of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind–body interactions require the direct intervention of God.
Another argument that has been proposed by C. S. Lewis is the Argument from Reason:
if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical
causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent
of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning
from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would
be no way of knowing this—or anything else—we could not even suppose
it, except by a fluke.
The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind.
The basic idea is that one can imagine one's body, and therefore
conceive the existence of one's body, without any conscious states being
associated with this body. Chalmers' argument is that it seems possible
that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all
and only the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie
must be true of it. Since none of the concepts involved in these
sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and
any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one. Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent, or unlikely, concept. It has been argued under physicalism that one must either
believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one
can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction
about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world
and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been
expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think they are conscious,
think they have qualia, think they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong'
(according to this lamentable tradition) in ways that neither they nor
we could ever discover!" See also the problem of other minds.
Avshalom Elitzur
has described himself as a "reluctant dualist". One argument Elitzur
makes in favor of dualism is an argument from bafflement. According to
Elitzur, a conscious being can conceive of a P-zombie version of
his/herself. However, a P-zombie cannot conceive of a version of itself
that lacks corresponding qualia.
Christian List argues that the existence of first-person perspectives is evidence against physicalist views of consciousness. According to List, first-personal phenomenal facts cannot supervene on
third-person physical facts. However, List argues that this also refutes
versions of dualism that have purely third-personal metaphysics. List
has proposed a model he calls the "many-worlds theory of consciousness"
in order to reconcile the subjective nature of consciousness without
lapsing into solipsism.
Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations. In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles. It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.
Descartes's argument for this position can be summarized as
follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking
thing that has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in
terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear and
distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended,
subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind
and body are not identical because they have radically different
properties.
Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal
effects on his body and vice versa: A child touches a hot stove
(physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell
(physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and
protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.
Descartes' argument depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this. For example, Joseph Agassi
suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th
century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own
ideas. Freud
claimed that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a
person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski
has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits
better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also
asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see
things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes'
argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better
than the person themself can.
Other forms of dualism
Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.
Psychophysical parallelism
Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism,
is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological
statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along
parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and
brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to
influence each other. This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad,
exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he
nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between
"the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God
had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in
harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.
Occasionalism
Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche as well as Islamic philosophers such as Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali
that asserts all supposedly causal relations between physical events,
or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all.
While body and mind are different substances, causes (whether mental or
physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention
on each specific occasion.
Property dualism
Property dualism is the view that the world is constituted of one kind of substance – the physical kind – and there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.
It is the view that non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs,
desires and emotions) inhere in some physical bodies (at least, brains).
Sub-varieties of property dualism include:
Emergent materialism
asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e., in
the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties
emerge in a way not fully accountable for by physical laws. These emergent properties have an independent ontological status and
cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate
from which they emerge. They are dependent on the physical properties
from which they emerge, but opinions vary as to the coherence of top–down causation, that is, the causal effectiveness of such properties. A form of emergent materialism has been espoused by David Chalmers and the concept has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, but it was already suggested in the 19th century by William James.
Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley. It consists of the view that mental phenomena are causally ineffectual,
where one or more mental states do not have any influence on physical
states or mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of
physical phenomena. Physical events can cause other physical and mental
events, but mental events cannot cause anything since they are just
causally inert by-products (i.e., epiphenomena) of the physical world. This view has been defended by Frank Jackson.
Non-reductive physicalism
is the view that mental properties form a separate ontological class to
physical properties: mental states (such as qualia) are not reducible
to physical states. The ontological stance towards qualia in the case of
non-reductive physicalism does not imply that qualia are causally
inert; this is what distinguishes it from epiphenomenalism.
Panpsychism
is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all
objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.
Superficially, it seems to be a form of property dualism, since it
regards everything as having both mental and physical properties.
However, some panpsychists say that mechanical behaviour is derived from
the primitive mentality of atoms and molecules—as are sophisticated
mentality and organic behaviour, the difference being attributed to the
presence or absence of complex structure in a compound object. So long as the reduction of non-mental properties to mental ones is in place, panpsychism is not a (strong) form of property dualism; otherwise it is.
Dual aspect theory
Dual aspect theory or dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical
are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. (Thus it is
a mixed position, which is monistic in some respects). In modern
philosophical writings, the theory's relationship to neutral monism
has become somewhat ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says
that whereas neutral monism allows the context of a given group of
neutral elements and the relationships into which they enter to
determine whether the group can be thought of as mental, physical, both,
or neither, dual-aspect theory suggests that the mental and the
physical are manifestations (or aspects) of some underlying substance,
entity or process that is itself neither mental nor physical as normally
understood. Various formulations of dual-aspect monism also require the
mental and the physical to be complementary, mutually irreducible and
perhaps inseparable (though distinct).
Experiential dualism
This
is a philosophy of mind that regards the degrees of freedom between
mental and physical well-being as not synonymous thus implying an
experiential dualism between body and mind. An example of these
disparate degrees of freedom is given by Allan Wallace
who notes that it is "experientially apparent that one may be
physically uncomfortable—for instance, while engaging in a strenuous
physical workout—while mentally cheerful; conversely, one may be
mentally distraught while experiencing physical comfort". Experiential dualism notes that our subjective experience of merely
seeing something in the physical world seems qualitatively different
from mental processes like grief that comes from losing a loved one.
This philosophy is a proponent of causal dualism, which is defined as
the dual ability for mental states and physical states to affect one
another. Mental states can cause changes in physical states and vice
versa.
However, unlike cartesian dualism or some other systems,
experiential dualism does not posit two fundamental substances in
reality: mind and matter. Rather, experiential dualism is to be
understood as a conceptual framework that gives credence to the
qualitative difference between the experience of mental and physical
states. Experiential dualism is accepted as the conceptual framework of Madhyamaka Buddhism.
Madhayamaka Buddhism goes further, finding fault with the monist view of
physicalist philosophies of mind as well in that these generally posit
matter and energy as the fundamental substance of reality. Nonetheless,
this does not imply that the cartesian dualist view is correct, rather
Madhyamaka regards as error any affirming view of a fundamental
substance to reality.
In denying the independent
self-existence of all the phenomena that make up the world of our
experience, the Madhyamaka view departs from both the substance dualism
of Descartes and the substance monism—namely, physicalism—that is
characteristic of modern science. The physicalism propounded by many
contemporary scientists seems to assert that the real world is composed
of physical things-in-themselves, while all mental phenomena are
regarded as mere appearances, devoid of any reality in and of
themselves. Much is made of this difference between appearances and
reality.
Indeed, physicalism, or the idea that matter is the only fundamental substance of reality, is explicitly rejected by Buddhism.
In
the Madhyamaka view, mental events are no more or less real than
physical events. In terms of our common-sense experience, differences of
kind do exist between physical and mental phenomena. While the former
commonly have mass, location, velocity, shape, size, and numerous other
physical attributes, these are not generally characteristic of mental
phenomena. For example, we do not commonly conceive of the feeling of
affection for another person as having mass or location. These physical
attributes are no more appropriate to other mental events such as
sadness, a recalled image from one's childhood, the visual perception of
a rose, or consciousness of any sort. Mental phenomena are, therefore,
not regarded as being physical, for the simple reason that they lack
many of the attributes that are uniquely characteristic of physical
phenomena. Thus, Buddhism has never adopted the physicalist principle
that regards only physical things as real.
Monist solutions to the mind–body problem
In contrast to dualism, monism
does not accept any fundamental divisions. The fundamentally disparate
nature of reality has been central to forms of eastern philosophies for
over two millennia. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how experience is understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist. Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is
physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best
science. However, a variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism,
according to which mental experience and properties may be at the
foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by
some philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin.
Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century. A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance
that is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then
both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was
adopted by Baruch Spinoza and was popularized by Ernst Mach in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject
to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form
predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the possibility
of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot
be scientific. The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental
life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus
instead on the description of observable behavior.
Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed. This is characterized by a strong verificationism,
which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental
life pointless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior
states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just
descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict another's behavior.
Philosophical behaviorism has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.
Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by Jack Smart and Ullin Place as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers
reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not
behavioral, then mental states are probably identical to internal states
of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B.
The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing
more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".
The
classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the
Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type
corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single
physical type. For anomalous monism, the token–token correspondences
can fall outside of the type–type correspondences. The result is token
identity.
On the other hand, even granted the above, it does not follow that
identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token
identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with
only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that there is
an absolute correlation between types of mental state and types of brain
state. The type–token distinction can be illustrated by a simple
example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n)
with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along with one each
of the others.
The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental
events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of
physical events. Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories. Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.
Mental states are characterized by their causal relations with
other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs.
Functionalism abstracts away from the details of the physical
implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of
non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized
scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and
maintaining certain chemical balances.
Non-reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential
convictions with regard to mind–body relations: 1) Physicalism is true
and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist
proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to
behavior, brain states or functional states. Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism. He "thinks that when one
runs across what are traditionally seen as absurdities of Reason, such
as akrasia
or self-deception, the personal psychology framework is not to be given
up in favor of the subpersonal one, but rather must be enlarged or
extended so that the rationality set out by the principle of charity can
be found elsewhere."
Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience:
mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to
them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there
can be no change in the mental without some change in the
physical–causal reducibility between the mental and physical without
ontological reducibility.
Weak emergentism is a form of "non-reductive physicalism" that
involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of
increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own special science.
Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental
levels, while others maintain that higher-order properties simply
supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The
latter group therefore holds a less strict, or "weaker", definition of
emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of
composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically impossible for
another object to lack property P if that object is composed of parts
with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in
an identical configuration.
Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen H and Oxygen O combine to form H2O
(water). In this example there "emerges" a new property of a
transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding
hydrogen and oxygen as gases. This is analogous to physical properties
of the brain giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve
the notorious mind–body gap this way. One problem for emergentism is the
idea of causal closure in the world that does not allow for a mind-to-body causation.
If one is a materialist and believes that all aspects of our common-sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive neuroscience, and that non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.
There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition. Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland
argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally
sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network
theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works.
The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies that have arisen in the course of history. For example, Ptolemaic astronomy served to explain and roughly predict
the motions of the planets for centuries, but eventually this model of
the Solar System
was eliminated in favor of the Copernican model. The Churchlands
believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model
of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating
sentence-like states called "propositional attitudes". Sociologist Jacy Reese Anthis
argues for eliminative materialism on all faculties of mind, including
consciousness, stating, "The deepest mysteries of the mind are within
our reach."
Some philosophers take an epistemic approach and argue that the
mind–body problem is currently unsolvable, and perhaps will always
remain unsolvable to human beings. This is usually termed New mysterianism. Colin McGinn holds that human beings are cognitively closed
in regards to their own minds. According to McGinn human minds lack the
concept-forming procedures to fully grasp how mental properties such as
consciousness arise from their causal basis. An example would be how an elephant is cognitively closed in regards to particle physics.
A more moderate conception has been expounded by Thomas Nagel,
which holds that the mind–body problem is currently unsolvable at the
present stage of scientific development and that it might take a future
scientific paradigm shift or revolution to bridge the explanatory gap. Nagel posits that in the future a sort of "objective phenomenology" might be able to bridge the gap between subjective conscious experience and its physical basis.
Linguistic criticism of the mind–body problem
Each
attempt to answer the mind–body problem encounters substantial
problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an
underlying conceptual confusion. These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory. They argue that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states
fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human experience
can be described in different ways—for instance, in a mental and in a
biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe
the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary
is used in the wrong contexts.[74]
This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of
the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental
vocabulary—the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.
Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker. However, Hilary Putnam,
the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the
mind–body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved
according to the manner of Wittgenstein.
Naturalism and its problems
The
thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or
physical) world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has
certain properties that no other material thing seems to possess.
Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these
properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of
providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental". Some of the crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve
include the existence of qualia and the nature of intentionality.
Many mental states seem to be experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals. And it is characteristic of a mental state that it has some experiential quality,
e.g. of pain, that it hurts. However, the sensation of pain between two
individuals may not be identical, since no one has a perfect way to
measure how much something hurts or of describing exactly how it feels
to hurt. Philosophers and scientists therefore ask where these
experiences come from. The existence of cerebral events, in and of
themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these
corresponding qualitative experiences. The puzzle of why many cerebral
processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in
consciousness seems impossible to explain.
Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences. This follows from an assumption about the possibility of reductive explanations.
According to this view, if an attempt can be successfully made to
explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), then it can be explained
why the phenomenon has all of its properties (e.g., fluidity,
transparency). In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an
explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a
certain way.
The 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger criticized the ontological
assumptions underpinning such a reductive model, and claimed that it
was impossible to make sense of experience in these terms. This is
because, according to Heidegger, the nature of our subjective experience
and its qualities is impossible to understand in terms of Cartesian
"substances" that bear "properties". Another way to put this is that
the very concept of qualitative experience is incoherent in terms of—or
is semantically incommensurable with the concept of—substances that bear properties.
This problem of explaining introspective first-person aspects of
mental states and consciousness in general in terms of third-person
quantitative neuroscience is called the explanatory gap. There are several different views of the nature of this gap among contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories involved and one cannot be reduced to the other. An alternative view is taken by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is epistemological
in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective
experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of
knowledge that is required. We are not even able to formulate the
problem coherently. For McGinn, on other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent
biological limitations. We are not able to resolve the explanatory gap
because the realm of subjective experiences is cognitively closed to us
in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to
elephants. Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem. This semantic problem, of course, led to the famous "Qualia Question", which is: Does Red cause Redness?
Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values.
When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises
a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or
false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can
mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility
of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are
about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus
was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was a
historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is
false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are
only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do
with Herodotus.
Philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience
and the status of perceptual objects, in particular how perceptual
experience relates to appearances and beliefs about the world. The main
contemporary views within philosophy of perception include naive realism, enactivism and representational views.
Philosophy of mind and science
A phrenological mapping of the brain – phrenology
was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with
specific parts of the brain although it is now widely discredited.
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to
examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental
processes are intimately related to bodily processes (e.g., embodied cognition
theory of mind), the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of
human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind. There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and psychology.
The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences
in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are,
in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the
foundations of mental activity and behavior. The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental
phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its
fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states
of a person without a change in brain states."
Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines
that are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states
and processes: Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation. Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes. Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain. Lastly, evolutionary biology
studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in
as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages. Evolutionary biology furthermore places tight constraints on any philosophical theory of the mind, as the gene-based mechanism of natural selection
does not allow any giant leaps in the development of neural complexity
or neural software but only incremental steps over long time periods.
Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI
(above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the
human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.
The methodological
breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of
high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the
elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main
goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which
correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate). Several groups are inspired by these advances.
Neurophilosophy is an interdisciplinary field that examines the
intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, particularly focusing on
how neuroscientific findings inform and challenge traditional arguments
in the philosophy of mind, offering insights into the nature of
consciousness, cognition, and the mind-brain relationship.
Patricia Churchland
argues for a deep integration of neuroscience and philosophy,
emphasizing that understanding the mind requires grounding philosophical
questions in empirical findings about the brain. Churchland challenges
traditional dualistic and purely conceptual approaches to the mind,
advocating for a materialistic framework where mental phenomena are
understood as brain processes. She posits that philosophical theories of
mind must be informed by advances in neuroscience, such as the study of
neural networks, brain plasticity, and the biochemical basis of
cognition and behavior. Churchland critiques the idea that introspection
or purely conceptual analysis can sufficiently explain consciousness,
arguing instead that empirical methods can illuminate how subjective
experiences arise from neural mechanisms.
An unsolved question in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind is the binding problem, which is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. It is considered a "problem" because no complete model exists. The binding problem can be subdivided into the four areas of perception,
neuroscience, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. It
includes general considerations on coordination, the subjective unity of
perception, and variable binding. Another related problem is known as the boundary problem. The boundary problem is essentially the inverse of the binding problem,
and asks how binding stops occurring and what prevents other
neurological phenomena from being included in first-person perspectives,
giving first-person perspectives hard boundaries.
Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers. From the beginning, computer programmers
have been able to develop programs that permit computers to carry out
tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is
multiplication. It is not clear whether computers could be said to have a
mind. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This
question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical
debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research
program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI.
The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the
successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make
computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on
the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human
beings. The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test. Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if
placed in a room by itself next to another room that contained a human
being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and
the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses
turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially,
Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model
of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has
received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese roomthought experiment formulated by Searle.
The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia)
of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists
believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the
resolution of the "mind–body problem". They suggest that based on the
reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in
all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered
that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human
mind and the brain (wetware).
Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly.
It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental
states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.
An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other. This law describes a relation between visual input and mental
perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the
nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are
compatible with all the answers to the mind–body problem already
described.
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition
is, what it does, and how it works. It includes research on
intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is
represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as
perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous
systems (human or other animals) and machines (e.g. computers).
Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision
mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to
modular brain organization. Over the years, cognitive science has
evolved from a representational and information processing approach to
explaining the mind to embrace an embodied
perspective of it. Accordingly, bodily processes play a significant
role in the acquisition, development, and shaping of cognitive
capabilities. For instance, Rowlands (2012) argues that cognition is enactive, embodied,
embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. The position is taken
that the "classical sandwich" of cognition sandwiched between perception
and action is artificial; cognition has to be seen as a product of a
strongly coupled interaction that cannot be divided this way.
In the field of near-death research, the following phenomenon, among
others, occurs: For example, during some brain operations the brain is
artificially and measurably deactivated. Nevertheless, some patients
report during this phase that they have perceived what is happening in
their surroundings, that is, that they have had consciousness. Patients
also report experiences during a cardiac arrest. There is the following
problem: As soon as the brain is no longer supplied with blood and thus
with oxygen after a cardiac arrest, the brain ceases its normal
operation after about 15 seconds, that is, the brain falls into a state
of unconsciousness.
Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
Most of the discussion in this article has focused on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy). Many other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad (and vague) label of continental philosophy. In any case, though topics and methods here are numerous, in relation
to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this label
(phenomenology, existentialism,
etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the analytic school in that
they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take in
other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With
reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to
translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely involve the analysis of linguistic forms.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
first published in 1781 and presented again with major revisions in
1787, represents a significant intervention into what will later become
known as the philosophy of mind. Kant's first critique is generally recognized as among the most significant works of modern philosophy in the West. Kant is a figure whose influence is marked in both continental and analytic/Anglo-American philosophy. Kant's work develops an in-depth study of transcendental consciousness, or the life of the mind as conceived through the universal categories of understanding.
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (frequently translated as Philosophy of Spirit or Geist), the third part of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the "subjective
mind/spirit", the mind of an individual; the "objective mind/spirit",
the mind of society and of the State; and the "Absolute mind/spirit",
the position of religion, art, and philosophy. See also Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Nonetheless, Hegel's work differs radically from the style of Anglo-American philosophy of mind.
In 1896, Henri Bergson made in Matter and Memory
"Essay on the relation of body and spirit" a forceful case for the
ontological difference of body and mind by reducing the problem to the
more definite one of memory, thus allowing for a solution built on the empirical test case of aphasia.
In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in
response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and
existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how processes shape our experiences. Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard,
focuses on Human predicament and how people deal with the situation of
being alive. Existential-phenomenology represents a major branch of
continental philosophy (they are not contradictory), rooted in the work
of Husserl but expressed in its fullest forms in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See Heidegger's Being and Time, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
Topics related to the philosophy of mind
There
are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the
philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity
have to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in
connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special
attention: free will and the self.
In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity. This is the case for materialistic determinists. According to this position, natural laws completely determine the
course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as
well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions
would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this
reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what
they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.
This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists.
Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?"
can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means.
The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It
is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act
is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen
otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is
true. The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume. More recently, this position was defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett.
On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism. These philosophers affirm the course of the world is either a) not
completely determined by natural law where natural law is intercepted by
physically independent agency, b) determined by indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by
indeterministic natural law in line with the subjective effort of
physically non-reducible agency. Under Libertarianism, the will does not have to be deterministic and,
therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the second proposition (b)
accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom.
They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then
we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely
accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by
anything, we are not free.
The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the
concept of "self". If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential,
immutable nucleus of the person, some modern philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett believe that no such thing exists. According to Dennett and other contemporaries, the self is considered an illusion. The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul.
Such an idea is unacceptable to modern philosophers with physicalist
orientations and their general skepticism of the concept of "self" as
postulated by David Hume, who could never catch himself not doing, thinking or feeling anything. However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and neuroscience,
the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus—an integrated
representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic
connections—seems reasonable.
One question central to the philosophy of personal identity is Benj Hellie's vertiginous question. The vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.) In other words: Why am I me and not someone else? A common response to
the question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live
from Hellie's perspective," and thus the entire question is a tautology.
However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves
something out. His parable describes two situations, one reflecting a
broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal
features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a
single subject. Caspar Hare has discussed similar ideas with the
concepts of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism.
In his book I am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics, Daniel Kolak advocates for a philosophy he calls open individualism. Open individualism states that individual personal identity is an
illusion and all individual conscious minds are in reality the same
being, similar to the idea of anattā
in Buddhist philosophy. Kolak describes three opposing philosophical
views of personal identity: closed individualism, empty individualism,
and open individualism. Closed individualism is considered to be the
default view of personal identity, which is that one's personal identity
consists of a ray or line traveling through time, and that one has a future self.
Empty individualism is another view, which is that personal identity
exists, but one's "identity" only persists for an infinitesimally small
amount of time, and the "you" that will exist in the future is an
ontologically different being from the "you" that exists now. Similar
ideas have been discussed by Derek Parfit in the book Reasons and Persons with thought experiments such as the teletransportation paradox.
Thomas Nagel further discusses the philosophy of self and perspective in the book The View from Nowhere.
It contrasts passive and active points of view in how humanity
interacts with the world, relying either on a subjective perspective
that reflects a point of view or an objective perspective that takes a
more detached perspective. Nagel describes the objective perspective as the "view from nowhere",
one where the only valuable ideas are ones derived independently.
Problems in Philosophy of Mind
1) Is the emergent level autonomous?
2) Can constraint and constitution be causal relations for mental causation?
3) Does Downward causation violate fundamental micro-level explanation?
4) Can downward causation between two levels be generalised to other levels?
5) Is self-organization an answer to reductionism – anti-reductionism debate? Is it a paradigm shift
from substance and process philosophy?
6) What is meaning of causation in Downward Causation
7) Synchronic and diachronic identity of individual self, problem of identity - Ship of Theseus .
8) Is the reductionism – antireductionism debate same as physicalism – nonreductive physicalism .
9) How can the higher level of organization which is dependent on the lower level for its existence
have any causal impact on the lower?
10) Is causal asymmetry is violated in mental causation?
11) Is Artificial Intelligence theoretical psychology?
12) Are special sciences like psychology autonomous in their explanation or reducible to lower levels.
13) Is perception controlled form of hallucination?
14) Why is there a subjective feeling when the brain is processing information?
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