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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: mind vs. brain (Searle, Rorty, Feyerabend)
Message-ID: <624@spar.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Oct-85 12:28:51 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.624
Posted: Mon Oct 28 12:28:51 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 31-Oct-85 23:29:38 EST
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Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
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>Let me suggest the following analogy: mind is to brain as digestion is
>to stomach.  (Somebody else recently used this analogy in a net
>article.  I'm borrowing it.)  Nobody ever talks of digestion/stomach
>dualism.  Nobody ever wonders whether digestion is just a function
>performed by the stomach, or whether digestion exists, perhaps,
>somewhere outside of physical reality, on some "digestive plane" of
>existence.  Nobody ever writes articles claiming that "no machine can
>produce digestion".  - David Canzi

    The analogy [mind:brain::digestion:stomach] was an earlier paraphrase by
    me from Searle, who indeed claims that a machine can produce mind,
    provided that machine has the causal properties of a brain.
    
    Where Searle diverges from strong AI is that he claims that mental
    states THEMSELVES are physical entities -- here he makes another
    analogy, between minds (not brains) and hands:
    
        My own approach to mental states and events has been totally
	realistic in the sense that I think there are such things as
	intrinsic mental phenomena that cannot be reduced to something else
	or eliminated by some kind of re-definition. There really are
	pains, tickles, itches, beliefs, fears, hopes, desires, perceptual
	experiences, experiences of acting, thoughts, feelings, and all the
	rest...

        If one were doing a study of hands or kidneys or of the heart,
	one would simply assume the existence of the structures in question,
	and then get on with the study of their structure and function.

	No one would think of saying "Having a hand is just being disposed
	to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism),
	or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects
	(manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for
	it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs
	and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that 
	a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance towards it"
	(the manual stance).
	
	How, then, are we to explain the fact that philosophers have said
	apparently strange things about the mental? An adequate answer to
	that question would trace the history of philosophy of mind since
	Descartes.. My brief diagnosis of the persistent anti-mentalistic
	tendency in recent analytical philosophy is that it is largely based
	on the tacit assumption that, unless there is some way to eliminate
	mental phenomena.. we will be left with a class of entities that lies 
	outside the realm of serious science and with an impossible
	problem of relating these entities to the real world of physical
	objects. We will be left, in short, with all the incoherence of
	Cartsesian Dualism..
	
	On my account, mental states are as real as any other biological
	phenomena..
	
	-John Searle, "Intentionality", Cambridge U. Press (1983)

    As we read in an interesting recent article from Rich Rosen, Searle's
    position has provoked angry responses from those, like Hofstadter, who
    lean towards the strong-AI thesis that mental states can be created by
    Turing machines. Hofstadter does not like Searle's position at all:
    
	This religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious
	scientific argument, is one of the wrongest, most infuriating
	articles I have ever read in my life.. it seems to me that what
	Searle and I have is, at the deepest level, a religious
	disagreement. - Hofstadter on Searle's "Minds, Brains, Programs"

    Hofstadter is often fascinating, but some of his ideas, for me, require
    a huge leap of faith. Somehow, the undeniable reality of mental
    experience emerges from a program of suitable formal complexity!
    Neither Searle nor Hofstadter are hardly the last word on the
    `mind/brain question', of course.  
    
    Those interested in philosophy of mind might also enjoy the perspective
    of Richard Rorty (an eliminative materialist like Paul Feyerabend).
    Rorty argues, among many things, that theories of the mind as an
    intentional network have lumped {feelings,sensations} together with
    {beliefs, intentions} in an ad hoc fashion. In this view, Searle may be
    guilty of kluging sensation into his intentional theory by
    gerrymandering painn, for instance, into a belief that one's tissues
    have been damaged, thus unwittingly recasting mind-body duality into a
    sensation-belief duality. Perhaps I have misunderstood, especially since
    what I know of Rorty's ideas preceded Searle's work by at least a year.
    
    Rorty's major work is `Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', where he
    reviews the historical invention of western concept of  mind (as an
    `inner eye') by the Greeks, thru Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein,
    and concludes with an attack on epistemology. Rorty quite possibly
    smashes the mirror...
    
	Feelings are just appearances. Their reality is exhausted in how
	they seem. They are pure seemings. Anything that is not a seeming
	(putting the intentional to the side for the moment) is merely
	physical -- that is, it is something that can appear other than it
	is. The world comes divided in things whose nature is exhausted by
	how they appear and things whose nature is not.
    
	That special sort of subject.. whose appearance IS its reality --
	(eg) phenomenal pain -- turns out to be simply the painfulness of
	the pain abstracted from the person having the pain. To put
	it oxymoronically, mental particulars, unlike mental states of
	people, turn out to be universals...
	
	It turns out, in other words, that the universal-particular
	distinction is the only metaphysical distinction we have..  The
	mental-physical distinction then is parasitic on the
	universal-particular distinction.  Further, the notion that
	mind-stuff as that out of which pains and beliefs are made makes
	exactly as much sense as the notion of `that out of which
	universals are made'. The battle between realists and conceptualists
	over thew status of universals is thus empty save that it is made
	of whatever universals are made of..
	
	We simply lift off a single property from something (the property of
	being red, or painful, or good) and then treat it as if it were the
	a subject of a predication and perhaps a locus of causal efficacy.
	
	-Richard Rorty, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979)

    The most anarchic yet somehow thoroughly sensible position, in my
    estimation, comes from the wild Paul Feyerabend, who has persistently
    supported eliminative materialism. Feyerabend, however, somehow
    reconciles materialism with his call for cultural pluralism -- after
    assaulting all the major anti-materialist arguments, he preceeds to
    encourage a materialist outlook that harmonizes with commonsense (or
    even spiritual) reality.
    
    The quotes below are taken from his "Materialism and the Mind-body
    problem". I apologize for the discontinuites induced by my severe
    editing of his arguments [my modifications in brackets]:
    
	The crudest form of materialism will be taken as the basis of
	argument.. A simple atomism such as the theory of Democritos will be
	sufficient for our purpose...
	    
	The first question that arises with the question about [the
	incorrigible certainty of mental experience] concerns the source of
	this certainty concerning mental processes. The answer is very
	simple: it is their lack of content which is the source of their
	certainty..  [as opposed to] statements about physical objects
	[which] possess very rich content...

	A new theory of pains will not change the pains.. It will change the
	meaning of "I am in pain". The causal connection between the
	production of a `mental' sentence and its `mental' antecedent is
	very strong. It is learned very early in life. It is the basis for
	all observations concerning the mind.. The connections [between
	meaning and reference] change all the time anyway. It is much more
	sensible to establish a one to one connection between observational
	terms and their causal antecedents, than between such words and
	their always variable meanings. This procedure has great benefits
	and can do no harm.. But it should not be used to turn intelligent
	people into nervous wrecks...
	        
	Materialism  (and for that matter objective spititualism like the
	Egyptian theory of BA..) recognizes [that mentalistic `facts' are
	peculiarities of spoken language] and suggests that [language] be
	altered... 
	    
	There is therefore, not a single reason why the attempt to give a
	purely physiological account of human beings should be abandoned, or
	why physiologists should leave `soul' out of their considerations...
	    
        [added 1980]

	On the other hand, it must not be admitted that the overthrow of an
	entire worldview, including the most familiar assumptions, can be
	stopped by the decision to make commonsense (and the views of man it
	contains) an essential part of any form of knowledge. Such a
	decision was made by Aristotle, and, much later, by Niels Bohr, in
	his interpretation of the quantum theory.  

-michael