The Philosurfer

Could the mental be physical?

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The brain is obviously physical, but what about the mind? It seems like it shouldn't be, but maybe we're just looking at the idea od physical wrong.

NOTES

  • What does 'physical' mean?
    • P1: 'physical' means 'spatial'
      • I.e., extended in space; has a volume
      • O1: photons are physical, but not spatial
    • P2: 'physical' means 'material'
      • I.e., made out of matter
      • O1: energy is physical, but not material
    • P3: 'physical' means 'describable and explainable using the concepts of physics'
  • What does 'mental' mean?
    • P1: 'mental' means 'describable and explainable using the concepts of psychology'
  • Argument for why the mental can't be physical
    1. Physical things are describable and explainable using the concepts of physics
    2. Mental things are describable and explainable using the concepts of psychology
    3. So, mental things are not physical things
    • O1: the same thing can be described and explained in different ways given the purpose of the scientist
      • S1: biologists and physicists explain and describe the same thing using their own sciences
      • N1: this only proves the mental and physical are not necessarily mutually exclusive, not that the mental is physical
    • O2: four-term fallacy

Further Reading

For more on René Descartes' definition of 'physical' as 'spatial,' read his Meditations on First Philosophy for free here, or get a more recent translation here

 

Who is a real friend? Aristotle’s Three Friends

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What makes a true friend? How do you tell a real friend from a fake one? Aristotle identifies three kinds of friends based one reasons we might love them. In this video, I explain how this is relevant today and whether or not he successfully identifies what makes a real friend.

NOTES

  • Kinds of friends correspond to object of love
  • 1. Useful friend
    • Object of love: usefulness
      • “object of love” = thing loved
      • External to friend
    • E.g., money, fame, power, sex, popularity
    • Lost when usefulness is gone
  • 2. Pleasure friend
    • Object of love: enjoyable characteristic
      • Internal, but incidental
    • E.g., attractive, funny, shared pastimes
    • Can be lost if:
      • Tastes change
      • Characteristic changes
  • 3. Perfect friend
    • Object of love: good person
    • E.g., specific people
    • Subject of love: good person
      • S1: only a good person desires the good
      • O1: true friends that aren’t good people
        • R1: degrees of virtuousness
    • A1: everyone benefits
      • 1. Virtue is conducive to happiness
        • S1: virtue is conducive to human flourishing
      • 2. Virtuous people pursue virtuous things for themselves
        • S1: virtuous person desires virtuous things
      • 3. The perfect friend is a second self
        • Virtuous person sees the good in the other and identifies with that person
      • 4. So, virtuous people pursue virtuous things for their perfect friends
      • 5. So, their perfect friends are more likely to be happy
    • A2: most enduring
      • 1. Virtue love = love of the person
      • 2. So, that won’t go away
      • O1: can’t you change your character?
        • Aristotle: yes
          • If your friend goes bad, then you can try to change him back if you’d like
          • But you don’t have to
    • O1: benefiting friend only b/c you see her as yourself, so this is a selfish love
      • R1: only when it’s about pleasing your desires, not when it’s about being noble
    • O2: object of love is the quality of the person, not the person himself; so it’s still about what we can get from that person, which is selfish
      • S1: otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to leave when they go bad

Further Reading

Aristotle Nicomachaen Ethics Book 8 and Book 9

Does God allow suffering for the sake of love?

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Love is probably the most important things to humans apart from what we need to survive and for safety. In this video, I explore the possibility that love requires suffering, and then I relate this idea to the Problem of Evil.

NOTES

  • Types of love
    • Self-interested loves (Aristotle)
      • 1. Friendship of Utility
      • 2. Friendship of Pleasure
      • 3. Friendship of Virtue
    • True love (Aquinas)
      • Desire for the good of the beloved
  • Love defense
    • 1. True love requires serving the beloved
    • 2. Serving presupposes a lack of some good needed
    • 3. The lack of a needed good is an evil
    • 4. So, true love requires evil exist
    • 5. True love is a great good
    • 6. So, possibly God allows evil for the sake of true love
    • I think this argument could be improved by changing (1) to say that true love is greatly benefited by serving the beloved. This would change (4) to say that true love is greatly benefited by the existence of evil. The overall point wouldn’t change because God would still be allowing evil for the sake of true love.

Can we see the mind?

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Extreme empiricism claims we shouldn’t believe in what we can’t observe. If the mind is unobservable, should we disbelieve it exists? What if we could see the mind? What would that be like?

NOTES

  • A1: From Extreme Empiricism
    • 1. We should only believe in what is observable (in principle, by our equipment, etc.)
    • 2. The mind is in no way observable
    • ∴3. We shouldn’t believe in the mind
  • Support for premise 2
    • A1: observation requires physicality
      • 1. Perception requires sense organs, a thing to be sensed, and possibly a medium
      • 2. All of these are physical
      • ∴3. No non-physical thing can be observed
      • O1: begs the question that all observation must be like ours
    • A2: the mind is first person
      • O1: mind-vision
        • Camera that can capture 100% of your brain structure and activity in real time
        • Interprets it into what that person is seeing
        • Then projects it onto a screen
        • R1: the mind is never observed; this is just an interpretation of the brain
    • O2: you directly observe your own mind
      • R1: this isn’t shared with others, so we can’t check the veracity
        • O1: content of perception is dubitable, not the existence of the perception
        • O2: in order to get agreement from others, we must rely on our experience of them
        • O3: verification assumes others are having perceptual experience
      • R2: Illusion objection
        • O1: illusion is nothing but psychological state
  • Corollary: The only thing we can be sure exists is the mind
    • The existence of the brain and body assumes the reliability (and therefore existence) of sense perception (i.e., the mind)

Are thoughts just neurons? Mind→Brain Reduction

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Assume the mind exists: is it anything more than the brain? The brain is responsible for so much in the mind, it’s hard to see how the two are separable. But then again, the brain is a material object—can the mind be material?

NOTES

  • Mind→brain reduction
    • 1. The mind exists
    • 2. But it is nothing more than the brain
  • A1: the brain affects the mind
    • S1: (Phineas Gage) brain affects personality
      • O1: psychological explanations
    • S2: brain affects abilities like language-use
      • O1: affects the mind’s ability to use the brain, not the mind
    • S3: (alcohol) brain induces emotions and experiences
  • O1: your brain doesn’t turn into the thing in your mind
    • 1. assume: The mind is nothing but the brain
    • 2. The brain is material
    • 3. So, the mind is material
    • 4. But, the mind is not material
      • S1: qualities in the mind don’t exist materially
        • E.g., you can see neon purple, but there is nowhere in your brain that is physically neon purple
      • S2: objects in the mind don’t exist materially
        • E.g., you can perceive a truck in your mind, but it doesn’t exist in your brain materially
      • S3: we can think about things that aren’t physically present
      • S4: we can think about things that don’t physically exist
    • A possible response to this objection is to adopt property dualism, which we will look at soon

Logical Behaviorism: Is “the mind” just shorthand for behaviors?

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Logical behaviorism is the idea that the mind and all its psychological states are nothing more than the behaviors we associate with them. If this is true, the mind-body problem seems easy to solve, but can behaviors always match up with psychological states? 

NOTES

  • Logical Behaviorism
    • Psychological states are not non-physical entities
    • Psychological states are real
    • Psychological states are just the behaviors we associate with them
      • S1: we ascribe psychological states to others based on their behaviors
      • Radical reduction
        • Psychological states as we think of them don’t really exist
          • Same as eliminitavism
        • But we can use the vocabulary of psychological states to describe behaviors
          • Different from eliminativism
  • O1: psychological states cause behaviors
    • “Debora looks like that because thinks her boyfriend is distracted.”
    • Translation: “Debora looks like that because she looks like that.”
  • O2: multiple psychological states assigned the same behavior
    • Belief and desire are interconnected in a way that behavior can’t account for
    • “Yutaro believes he sees is a pigeon.”
    • ‘believes’ is a psychological state
    • Translation: Yutaro is reaching out towards a flying animal
    • You can believe this without reaching towards the flying animal
    • Must add: “Yutaro is reaching out to touch the flying animal because he wants to touch a pigeon.”
    • ‘want’ is a psychological state
    • Translation: “Yutaro is reaching out towards a flying animal because Yutaro is reaching out towards a flying animal”
  • O3: psychological states are not isomorphic with associated behaviors
    • S1: multiple psychological states assigned to one behavior (belief-desire objection)
    • S2: behavior w/o psychological states (super actors)
    • S3: psychological states w/o behavior (super Spartans)
  • O4: others would have better access to your psychological states than you would

Eliminativism: Is “mind” just a pre-neuroscience word?

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The mind-body problem asks whether or not we have a mind distinct from our brain. Eliminativists argue that the idea of a mind is a pre-scientific entity that has been superseded by neuroscience. In this video, I review the main eliminativist argument and it’s objections.

NOTES

  • Mind-body Problem
    • Brain is material; mind seems immaterial
    • What is really real?
      • The brain only?
      • The mind only?
      • The brain and the mind?
      • Neither?
  • The Eliminativist Argument
    • 1. When belief in an entity is solely the result of a folk theory that has been superseded by a valid scientific theory, you should stop believing in that entity
    • 2. Belief in the mind is the result of a folk theory (folk psychology) that has been superseded by a valid scientific theory (neuroscience)
    • 3. So, we should stop believing the mind exists
    • O1: I posit other minds b/c of direct observation of my own
    • O2: I have direct access to my experiences right now, regardless of whether I posited them as a theory or not
      • R1: you are not having an experience at all; this is just an illusion
        • O1: an illusion is an experience

The Manichaean Defense

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Why does God allow evil to exist? Possibly evil is necessarily connected to goodness. Maybe in order for us to have goodness, we must have evil as well. Or, maybe we need to have evil in order to understand what good is and to appreciate it.

NOTES

The Problem of Evil

  • 1. If God exists, He could prevent evil
    • S1: all-powerful & all-knowing
  • 2. If God exists, He would prevent evil
    • S1: all-good
  • So, 3. If God exists, evil doesn’t exist
  • 4. Evil exists
  • So, 5. God doesn’t exist

The Manichaean Defense

  • 1. Evil is necessarily tied to goodness such that, in order for good to exist, evil must exist
  • 2. It is good for there to be goodness
  • So, 3. Possibly, God allows evil for there to be goodness
  • O1: false ex hypothesi
    • God is all good and exists before anything else, so good is possible without evil
  • O2: counterexample
    • A world with one good thing and nothing else
  • O3: ontological link is questionable
    • 1. Manichaean View posits a necessary connection between the existence of good and the existence of evil
    • 2. There is no good reason to think such a link exists

The Epistemological Manichaean Defense

  • 1. Propositional knowledge can at best yield theoretic understanding of the good
  • 2. Experiential knowledge yields appreciation and enjoyment of the good
  • So, 3. Experiential knowledge is ceteris paribus better than propositional knowledge
  • So, 4. Possibly, God allows evil so we can appreciate and truly enjoy the good, whereas without it we wouldn’t be able to
  • O1: entails that sin is good
    • R1: we can experience evil w/o committing evil
      • Though it would still be the case that your experiential knowledge is good, the deed would still be bad overall
  • O2: I would rather just trust God about goodness rather than get experiential knowledge of evil
    • R1: even if it’s not what you prefer, it could still be good and therefore something God would allow

The Character Building Response

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Why does God allow evil? The Character Building Defense argues that it is because we become better people for it. Is it worth the suffering to build character?

NOTES

The Problem of Evil

  • 1. If God exists, He could prevent evil
    • S1: all-powerful & all-knowing
  • 2. If God exists, He would prevent evil
    • S1: all-good
  • So, 3. If God exists, evil doesn’t exist
  • 4. Evil exists
  • So, 5. God doesn’t exist

The Character Building Defense

  • God allows suffering because it makes us better people
  • O1: the character isn’t worth the suffering
    • R1: God allows little evils b/c it preps us for big evils
      • O1: why allow any evil?
    • R2: Possibly we can’t be happy w/o high character
      • P1: there is a necessary connection between character and happiness
        • E.g., cowardice lends itself to the suffering of fear
      • P2: it’s just the way we should be
    • R3: possibly it’s just a good thing to have strong character
      • S1: stories we read don’t feature someone who’s never had any evil happen and are cowards
        • O1: this is just comfort to get us through our current suffering
          • R1: we’re still looking forward to that thing we think will be worth it
      • S2: people who have the character built up wouldn’t give it up to avoid the evil
  • O2: God could have made us with high character already built in
    • R1: it’s good that we have something to do with our own character building
  • O3: not all evil is character building
    • S1: when someone dies
    • S2: when someone doesn’t react in a way that builds character
    • S3: animal suffering?
    • R1: partial response succeeds