Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site spar.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!spar!ellis 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 References: <1794@watdcsu.UUCP> Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) Distribution: net Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA Lines: 172 >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